How did you hear about the ALUCA TurksLegal Scholarship and what made you decide to enter?
I heard about the ALUCA TurksLegal Scholarship through my employer, CommInsure. CommInsure heavily promotes participation in the scholarship through internal communications and via the leadership team.
As I’d been developing my skills in writing over the last couple of years, this seemed like a good challenge. My mind was made up once I saw that one of the questions was about InsureTech as this aligned perfectly with my own interests.
What was your paper about?
My paper was about InsureTech and how it will shape the insurance industry over the next 10 years. By InsureTech I mean emerging technologies such as automation, Big Data, machine learning and block chain. I looked at how these technologies may solve current challenges facing the insurance industry, and highlighted how pioneering start-ups that have embraced these technologies are already taking customers away from the more traditional insurers. InsureTech will impact every level of insurance: actuaries, product managers, underwriters, administrators and claim managers. The challenge for our industry is to embrace InsureTech sooner rather than later. Click here to read Evgeney’s paper.
Tell us what you won.
The prize for winning the Scholarship was a trip to attend a life insurance conference of my choice in the U.S. The Scholarship prize included flights, accommodation, conference registration and $1,000 in spending money! I chose to attend the Eastern Claims Conference held in Boston in April this year. The conference was very interesting and I had the opportunity to speak with a number of delegates about InsureTech. I found U.S. insurers have a much stronger appetite for cracking down on fraud and they rigorously prosecute those who commit fraud. For example, one of the strengths of InsureTech they promoted was the ability to identify fraudulent activity through profiling customer actions and behaviours, resulting in substantial cost savings for the business. It was also interesting to see the number of InsureTech products already available in the U.S. marketplace to streamline processes for insurers. What I took away from the conference is that Australia is behind the U.S. in adopting InsureTech by about five years.
Have any opportunities come about since winning the Scholarship?
Since winning the Scholarship I have had the opportunity to participate in the TurksLegal ALUCA LIFT (Life Insurance Future Thinking) Roundtable event held in November last year. This was a fantastic opportunity to get together with Scholarship alumni and industry experts to connect and share ideas on a particular life insurance topic. The topic of debate was Mental Health in Insurance which I found very interesting. Also, as part of the prize for winning the Scholarship, I have been invited to sit on the judging panel alongside senior industry leaders for this year’s ALUCA TurksLegal
Scholarship.
What would be your advice to others considering entering the ALUCA TurksLegal Scholarship?
I highly recommend entering the scholarship. You need to give yourself as much time as possible to complete your submission, so I strongly recommend planning ahead and setting aside plenty of time in your calendar. Start working on your paper as soon as the questions are published. Pick a question that interests or resonates with you. Then start researching. Read as much as you can on the topic. The internet is a good starting point. Keep a list of the articles and any other sources. Then you need to plan your paper. Make sureyou have a clear, logical argument, and support your argument with plenty of examples, referencing and acknowledging the sources. Keep your writing simple and to the point, and try to avoid unnecessary jargon.