Okay. We're now going to take a look at a specialty area of Fintech known as insurtech or the application of various kinds of technologies in the insurance industry. The insurance industry is huge, it's global, it's diversified across applications and subsegments. According to some recent calibrations, Gross Written Premium stood at an almost $5 trillion at the end of 2017. Gross Written Premium is essentially the amount of insurance written not including commissions and some costs. That premier is growing fastest in emerging markets. Net income was estimated by Ernst &Young to have grown 23 percent in 2018 versus 14 percent in 2017. Now, the insurance industry is a very old and traditional industry, in fact, some say contracts that help people insure various risks go back as many as thousands of years. It's clear, however, that the advent of modern technologies is changing and even some would say disrupting this stayed industry via all kinds of methodologies and mediums. Wearables, driverless vehicles, IoT or the Internet of Things, Big Data, natural language processing, blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, even the possibility of climate change affecting those who are insured along with many others are adding up through the avenues of technology to serve as a disrupting force. New technologies are also offering all kinds of potential opportunities to do today's business better in the industry or to grow markets, to make better decisions and address what we could call the customer experience, all coming together as insurtech. Now, there is no standardized definition of insurtech. Some would say that even though it's disrupting and revolutionizing the industry and rapidly today already changing the way insurers, service providers, and ultimately customers experience insurance. There is no standard definition. I like the definition that SIA put together. InsurTech can be described as, "An insurance company, intermediary, or value chain segment component that utilizes technology to compete will provide better benefits, value-added benefits in the industry." Now, the ecosystem of technologies that are coming to play in the insurance industry are many, some of which you've already probably been exposed to like blockchain. Efficient information exchange, trust, the ability to write contracts that are self-referential and self-aware and which offer a certain kind of immutability, ultimately appropriate because after all insurance is essentially in the form of a contract. Analytics that help insurers, their service providers, underwriters, and others make better decisions, taking more from data, expanding to new data, augmenting data. The insurance industry and the processing of insurance requires vast amounts of repetitive tasks making insurance ripe for process automation. Rules-based or potentially ultimately self-aware, increasing reliability, decreasing mistakes, and ultimately automating what traditionally has been a human task oriented area. Robo advisors who rely on rules or other kinds of machine learning techniques to interact with customers, it could be customers interacting with technology online or over the phone either enhancing, making more immediate or more accurate customer interactions. A very interesting area known as wearables, providing data both about the insured or those who are related to the insured all the way back to insurers helping them manage risks, understanding the insured, perhaps improving the customer experience in real-time or in aggregated way. Connecting ecosystems which could be, by the way, as broad and far-reaching as social media or based on data already collected within the ecosystem of the insured linking back to the entire value chain of insurance. Understanding the client better to better profile their risks and potentially spot both service lapses and rising risks in a more accurate way or in a faster way. Technologies like drone technologies or visual processing technologies, using for aerial imagery, remote assessment, and integrity of images and imagery used in the insurance underwriting process or for claims. Artificial intelligence, AI, including natural language processing, mimicking the human capacity to process language, to learn, to extract patterns not easily seen using traditional technologies including even advanced statistics and ultimately making a customer's experience and an insurers decision-making process better.
