Automated Personalisation and Consumer Insurtech in European Law: Prospects and Challenges
摘要
Personalisation of insurance products and services for consumers is a well-known and much debated trend in the InsurTech industry. Many empirical and critical studies, stemming from common law jurisdictions, have highlighted how insurance personalization nurtures surveillance capitalism and results in risks to individual customers, as well as to the insurance sector as a whole. The chapter investigates whether and to what extent a similar tendency towards automated personalisation of prices, continuous (self-)monitoring and real-time adjustment of contractual terms might be said to be occurring in continental European consumer insurance practice. Its findings attempt to demonstrate that many of the perils associated with automated personalisation in consumer insurance in the English-speaking debate, at least for the time being, are quite distant from Europe. What is rather occurring in Europe is a different yet equally worrisome trend towards the mass customisation of consumer insurance contracts and the robotisation of the insurer-customer relationship, especially in the pre-contractual and in the claim handling phases.