Insurance Innovations 2017 featured Key stakeholders in the MENA Insurance Industry in a two-day conference highlighting the importance of Innovation

Insurance Innovations Conference closed the curtains on a successful two-day event yesterday at the Nassima Royal Hotel in Dubai. The conference witnessed key stakeholders in the insurance industry come together and engage in a dialogue on the role of innovation in insurance and major trends reshaping the industry. The event was inaugurated by Sameh Hafez, VP of Customer Proposition at Oman Insurance Company, who also delivered the opening address. This was followed by a keynote session titled “The race to the top with digital era innovations to stay ahead” by Fareed Lutfi, Secretary General at Emirates Insurance Association.

The keynote addresses were followed by in-depth sessions on digital disruption and health insurance, insurance aggregators in GCC, fostering collaborative relationships between startups and insurers and digital innovations for customer experience by esteemed speakers from the National Health Insurance Company (Daman), SouqAl Mal, GISBA, Startupbootcamp InsurTech and Union Insurance Company.

Nameer Khan, Group Head Bancataful at Pak-Qatar Family Takaful said, while presenting a session on transformation and new initiatives: “Rapidly changing customer behavior, the availability of smart devices and innovation ecosystems achieving scale have provided the industry a much needed push. New digital capabilities and Internet of Things (IoT) devices will break the Steeped in tradition, burdened by outdated systems and paper-based operations. Consequently, also result in reducing costs, changing systems and processes are the core drivers for driving towards a change for good”.

The key highlights of the day included a tech panel discussion titled 'Exploring InsurTech options that can and will be implemented in this region' was joined by Ambareen Musa, CEO of SouqAlMal, Sameh Hafez, VP of Oman Insurance, Tanvir Haque, CCO at Life Care International and Nameer Khan, Group Head Bancatakaful at Pak-Qatar Family as panelists while Tammer Qaddumi, Partner at VentureSouq moderated the session.

“Digital transformation will no doubt become a major industry disruptor. Like FinTech, InsurTech is on the rise and it will only gather more momentum as the industry embraces change through digital technologies. Insurance providers are now going directly to the customers, offering their products online through their own digital footprint and as we are seeing here in the UAE, 'aggregators' are now entering the market. The online channel could be seen as a threat to the broker, as digital channels will impact the way brokers do business. We, at Life Care, are embracing the change and we have decided to react positively by partnering with digital businesses as we look to introduce digital platforms and systems to make it easier for our customers to purchase insurance products and manage risk” said Tanvir Haque during the tech panel discussion.

While speaking about innovation in InsurTech and telematics, Matteo carbone, Founder of Connected Insurance Observatory, said: “I’m bold about connected insurance. I’m talking about any insurance value proposition based on the use of sensors for collecting and transmitting data on the status of an insured risk and the deployment of the capabilities to transform raw information into actionable knowledge along the insurance value chain. Connected insurance can be applied to many insurance business lines but the auto insurance use case is the more mature. I’m expecting to see start the adoption also in GCC.”

The second day of the conference witnessed a keynote address by Dr. Haidar Al Yousuf, Director of the Health Funding Department at the Dubai Health Authority titled 'Updates on mandatory health insurance roll-out in UAE'. The day also featured insightful case studies and exhaustive sessions by Thomas Hirschi, Executive Director of Banking and Insurance at the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Abu Dhabi Global Market, Ingo Pischetsrieder, Director of Digitalization and Innovation at Daman Health Insurance, Thameur Zghal, Risk Manager at Axa Gulf, Fredrik Bisbjerg, EVP at Qatar Insurance Company, Gagandeep Gill, VP of Strata Operations at Orient Insurance, David Harris, Director of Distribution at RSA Insurance, Sreenath Manghat, Head of Insurance and Retail Wealth at Bank Muscat, Alexander Blom, Head of Financial Lines MENA at AIG and Jack Alexander Davies from Xpert Learning.

Insurance Innovations 2017 conference is organized by Fleming, and is officially supported by the Insurance Authority of Dubai, while Qlik, virtual I and Dar Al Takaful have partnered as the Analytics Partner, Associate Partner and Networking Partner respectively.