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‘The real business of insurance is the mitigation of countless misfortunes.’

– Joseph George Robins (1856–1927)

The purpose of this book is not to create a textbook on either insurance or technology, so those who are looking for great depth of information on either are likely to be disappointed. Others who need to know the ins and outs of legal case law such as Rylands v Fletcher, or the detailed working of a Hadoop network are also likely to be disappointed, and will need to look elsewhere. Indeed, there are many books which already do good service to that cause. Perhaps helpfully, a list of recommended other reading is shown in Appendix A. This book is somewhat different as it seeks to exist in one of the exciting interfaces between insurance and technology which we have come to know as the topic of Big Data and Analytics.

Readers are most likely to come from one of two camps. For those whose origins are as insurance practitioners, they are likely to either have taken technology for granted, perhaps turned a blind eye or simply become disaffected because of the jargon used. After all, isn't technology something which happens ‘over there’ and is done by ‘other people’?

The technologist might see matters in a different way. Their way is about the challenges of data management, governance, cleansing, tooling, and developing appropriate organizational and individual capabilities. The language of ‘apps’ and ‘widgets’ is as foreign to the insurance practitioner as are terms like ‘indemnity’ and ‘non-disclosure’ to the technologist.

The practice of insurance, and the implementation of technology should not – and cannot – become mutually exclusive. Technology has become the great enabler of change of the insurance industry, and will continue to be so especially in the area of Big Data and Analytics which is one of the hottest topics in the financial services sector.

So there is the crunch: 21st-century technology and how it impacts on a 300-year-old insurance industry. To understand the future it is necessary to think for a short while about the past, to allow current thinking to be placed in context.