Claims is a people business — virtually every claims executive I have ever met believes this. If you have ever been in a vehicle accident, experienced damage to your home or business, or been injured in a work-related incident, one of the first things that comes to mind is: I need to talk to someone who can assure me that I have insurance coverage and that there will be resources, both financial and technical, to make me whole again.

Cybersecurity is back in the news as banks, insurers and other financial entities faced another tough compliance hurdle in New York.The Sept. 4 deadline brought another host of requirements contained within New York’s tough cybersecurity initiative approved last year.

Three trends in technology are poised to make significant impacts in medical care, and by the nature of our relationship to that industry, in workers’ compensation itself. The continuing advancements in miniaturization, artificial intelligence and robotics will give us unparalleled opportunity to improve care and achieve more satisfactory outcomes.

As monikers go, the “dark web” has certainly lived up to its name. A vast swath of the internet accessible only through special software that keeps users anonymous and untraceable, it is the preferred realm for criminals, threat actors and others who take part in a bustling online underground.

A lot has already been written about blockchain and what it is, but for those who need a quick refresher, Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani provided this summation in the January-February 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review, “The Truth About Blockchain”: “The technology at the heart of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. The ledger itself can also be programmed to trigger transactions automatically.”

Insurance companies with legacy systems can find it extremely challenging to bring their data together because of different data formats and system access methods.

Canadian insurers wanting to handle claims like Lemonade are going to have to accept some trade-offs, a Claims Summit speaker said Tuesday.

Some insurers are considering how artificial intelligence could help underwrite marine risks.

f lawyers are to represent insurers, if they are to be counselors in the fullest sense of the word, if they are to anticipate and answer questions of the highest importance, they must understand how technology continues to transform the insurance industry as a whole.

Given that “there are no 10-year-old blockchain companies” in an industry that relies heavily on historical data, how do insurers assess a submission for insurance related to the distributed ledger?

For enterprise security teams, mobile has quickly become a top trouble spot. Employees use mobile apps every day to do their work and interact with enterprise data. But many of those apps also provide access for hackers.

Claims adjusters could soon have part of their work replaced by software that looks at photos and decides whether property is damaged, but there is still a need for humans in the process, one researcher predicts.

The Institutes RiskBlock Alliance, the first blockchain consortium for the risk management and insurance industry, announced today that EY will serve as a primary service provider for blockchain-specific cybersecurity and risk management guidance. These services are part of the 30-member consortium’s efforts to implement and test multiple insurance use cases by the end of 2018.

For millions of Americans, this summer has been marked by climate-related risks. USA Today reported in July that 40 million people from Washington to Arizona were facing an excessive heat warning while in the Eastern US, around 32 million people were under a flood watch during the same period.

Insurance is a business of change and only the flexible and the open-minded have the chance to survive and thrive. That is the mindset of Elizabeth Francy Demaret (pictured), Sedgwick’s chief of staff and executive vice president for carrier relations.