The Future of Insurance Intermediation in the Age of the Digital Platform Economy

Abstract

Today most insurance is sold by over a million brokers and independent agents acting as intermediaries between the insurance companies and their customers. Digitalization and changing customer behavior have fostered the development of insurtech businesses, and, more recently, multi-sided platforms are emerging as new market forms for insurance intermediation. This paper aims to provide a better understanding of how the emergence of the platform economy, with a market dominated by multi-sided platforms, will potentially impact insurance intermediation in the future. Using inductive content analysis on the results of a systematic literature review of the body of research on insurance intermediation, we identify the key functional roles fulfilled by insurance intermediaries. Applying these roles to a literature review on multi-sided platforms allows us to compare how different market forms and players embody the functional roles of intermediaries. Our findings suggest that multi-sided platforms are better able to perform certain roles in terms of agility, scale and scope, and we discuss the future role of platforms in insurance intermediation.