Insurance and Risk Management

Flight Insurance

One of the earliest forms of insurance to reach production will be flight insurance. Due to a range of uncontrollable variables such as weather and maintenance, flights are often delayed, leading to inconveniences for business travelers. Flight insurance policies allow travelers to mitigate these opportunity costs, as they pay out compensation in the event of a delay.

Car Insurance

Modern vehicles come with a wide range of internal sensors, internet connectivity, and even native APIs. As vehicle-based APIs grow more sophisticated, new forms of insurance will become available including parametric car insurance that triggers based on numerous impact sensors in the vehicle or insurance discounts based on metrics like mileage driven per year.

Home Insurance

The growing “smart home” phenomenon is leading to sensors and advanced security systems that automatically inform homeowners and emergency services of unusual events. These sensors can be connected to smart contracts through oracles in order to create new parametric home insurance products. Especially useful for vacation homes and other residences that are not used year-round, insurance products can be wired to detect broken pipes, malfunctioning solar panels, or even home intrusions as a means of a more direct skin-in-the-game alarm system protection from companies.

Life Insurance

Real live data is ideal for reducing the costs and occurrence of disputes, as well as speeding up the time of settlement. Numerous web APIs and external databases host sufficient data for determining if and when a death occurred, such as death certificates, obituaries, cremation records, and police reports. Price feeds can use that data to autonomously issue out payments and distribute assets amongst several parties listed in a life insurance policy, eliminating unnecessary overhead and accelerating payments to policyholders.

Health Insurance

Due to countless advancements in biotech and IoT wearables (e.g. Smartwatches), insurance companies can create smart contracts that offer health insurance discounts or trigger penalties based on a patient’s health data. Useful data points can include distance traveled (exercise), body weight, heart rate, and possibly more advanced biometrics as they are made available into the future. Oracles can also spot data anomalies that can trigger mandatory consultations in order to keep favorable policy rates.

Crop Insurance

Crop insurance has long been considered an especially promising use case as it provides farmers in developing nations with insurance which they otherwise could not get access to or don’t trust due to underdeveloped local insurance markets. By providing anyone with an Internet connection the ability to hedge against unforeseen weather conditions, farmers all over the world are able to maintain their livelihood without the concern that one bad weather season could cause financial ruin.