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The sharp-witted podcast below presented by KNext365, an Informa business, is a great 30-minute immersion into the convergence of commercial lines and technology.

Paolo Cuomo, principal at Boston Consulting Group, Andrew Yeoman, chief executive officer at Concirrus (London-based IoT startup providing digital insurance underwriting tools), and John Warburton, chief executive officer at Konsileo (London-based commercial insurance broking startup), cover a lot of ground delving into the key question for brokers: What does advice look like in the future?

There is a new value chain building up around advice to businesses—what risk is, using data—but it’s very different to how the insurance industry is setup at the moment. We are moving from a world where an insurance policy is written once a year and a broker takes historic reported data to an underwriter who makes a decision—to a world using observable behavior to understand on an ongoing basis what’s happening and how the risk is changing and how the carrier wants to engage with that. And, yes, there is absolutely a role for the broker to play in that.

What We’re Reading

Zenefits P&C Customers: Welcome to Embroker
Founder and CEO, Matt Miller, blogs this week on Embroker’s move to provide p/c insurance programs to Zenefits customers.

MarketScout Sells Workers’ Comp MGA to Fund Insurtech Investments
The MGA model continues to open doors for industry and Insurtech players via the extreme efficiency of leveraging the resources of an existing insurance company.

Tesla is Pushing the Insurance Industry to Prepare for Massive Disruption
Risk moving from every single car to, say, five car manufacturers, is hard to imagine but a self-driving world is a great example of the need for advisors who deeply understand risk and can help setup systems of IoT and aggregate and interpret data into a meaningful, actionable set of management insights.

Amazon to Ramp up Lending in Challenge to Big Banks
Amazon is quietly entering banks’ territory by offering lending facilities. It lent more than $1 Billion in small loans to sellers in the past 12 months, compared with more than $1.5 Billion, which it lent from 2011 to 2015, said Peeyush Nahar of Amazon Marketplace. Over 20,000 small businesses have borrowed money from Amazon, with over half of those taking a second loan from the company. The loans are proving to be increasingly lucrative for Amazon because it takes a cut of transactions on its site and many merchants use the invitation-only loans to boost inventory or discount items. Amazon viewed this as a constraint for the small businesses selling products in their marketplace and their lending platform helps to enmesh these customers even further. Amazon continues to look at other constraints for small businesses.

Insurtech Caught On The Radar: Hype Or The Next Frontier?
Oliver Wyman’s joint report with Insurtech investor Policen Direkt is based on a global database that tracks over 1,000 Insurtechs and other relevant players. The report expertly maps them into a framework defined by three aggregated segments of the insurance industry value chain: proposition, distribution and operations.

40 Top FinTech Experts to Follow on Twitter in 2017
Twitter is one of the best ways to monitor #insurtech; this is a good list to incorporate into your Twitter feed.