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Real-time insurance Pay per-risk
The availability of huge volumes of data in real time is changing insurance
实时保险 按次计价
实时可获的大量数据正在改变保险业
EVEN at weddings or whale watches, the buzz of a drone is no longer a surprise. Drone photography is booming. Gartner, a consultancy, says some 174,000 drones will be sold for commercial use around the world this year, and 2.8m to consumers. It is easy to imagine a few might fall out of the sky, causing damage the pilot cannot hope to pay for: crushed wedding cakes, injured spectators and so on. Amid scores of near-misses, several incidents have already occurred. In 2014, for example, a drone filming a triathlon in Australia crashed on a competitor’s head. 即便是在婚礼现场或是观看鲸鱼时，无人机的嗡嗡声也已不是什么新鲜事。无人机摄影正在蓬勃发展。咨询公司高德纳(Gartner)称，今年全球将售出约17.4万架商用无人机和280万架消费级无人机。不难想象，其中一些可能会从空中坠落，造成操控员不得不赔偿的损失，例如压碎的婚礼蛋糕、受伤的观众等等。很多时候险情侥幸得以避免，但也有几次事故真的发生了。2014年，澳大利亚的一架无人机在拍摄铁人三项赛时砸中了一位参赛者的头。
Clearly, drone-users need insurance. Typically, risks are insured through the payment of an annual premium. Insure4drones, a British specialist, charges £738.86 ($1,000) to cover a DJI Phantom, a bestselling drone, for a year. From October Flock, a London startup, will offer insurance on a flight-by-flight basis, at the push of a button in an app, to any commercial drone-operator in Britain. Cover for amateur pilots will soon follow. Costs will be about £5 per hour of flight, according to Allianz, an underwriter. 显然，无人机用户需要保险。他们一般通过支付保险年费来覆盖风险。英国专业保险公司Insure4drones为最畅销的无人机大疆精灵(Phantom)开出的保费是每年738.86英镑(1000美元)。从10月起，伦敦创业公司Flock将向全英国的商用无人机运营商提供按次计费的保险，只需在一款应用上点击按钮即可。针对非专业无人机操控员的保险业务也将很快跟上。安联保险公司称，每飞行一小时的保费约为5英镑。
Flock’s app relies on a wide range of data. Weather forecasts come from IBM, a computing giant which, having spent over $2bn on The Weather Company in 2015, now offers forecasts to within a few hundred metres, and over a period of minutes. Live information about nearby aircraft is provided by a software company called Snowflake, which tracks aeroplanes around the planet. Flock also considers local topography, such as proximity to churches, hospitals and schools, as well as roads and traffic levels. It also monitors the drone itself, gathering data as it flies to build a risk profile for that machine. All these numbers are crunched when a customer requests insurance through the app. As well as offering a quote, the app tells pilots how to reduce their risks. Flock的应用倚赖各种各样的数据。首先是来自计算巨头IBM的天气预报。IBM在2015年斥资逾20亿美元收购了天气公司(The Weather Company)，现在能提供精确到几百米范围、几分钟内的天气预报。一家名为雪花(Snowflake)的软件公司提供了关于附近飞行器的实时信息。该公司追踪全球范围内的飞机。Flock还会考虑当地的地形地貌，比如到教堂、医院和学校的距离，以及道路和交通状况。它也会监控无人机本身，收集其飞行数据，为其建立风险档案。当用户通过应用要求投保时，应用会分析所有这些数据。除了给出报价，应用还会告诉操控员如何降低风险。
Allianz then converts Flock’s data-driven risk scores into a price. The attraction for Allianz is acquiring customers cheaply. “Rather than humans sitting and writing business, the algorithm does it on the spot,” says Tom Chamberlain, who manages its aviation underwriting. 然后，安联会把Flock根据数据得出的风险评分转换成一个价格。对安联来说，这种方式的吸引力在于获得客户的成本很低。该公司负责航空保险的汤姆·张伯伦(Tom Chamberlain)说：“算法随时随地就能搞定，不需要人们坐下来写保单。”
Conventional insurance works by pooling individual risks and then setting a price for that group—new drivers under 30, say. But that process can be much refined if the objects and people being insured can report to the insurer automatically, and if there is a wealth of data on the external environment. As an ever-growing number of sensors—in phones or watches, drones or cars—gather ever-greater volumes of data, more and more activities can be assessed for real-time risk (though in the absence of pooling, some risks may become prohibitively expensive to insure). 传统保险的运营方式是将个体的风险汇聚起来，然后为这个群体设定一个统一的价格，比如30岁以下的新手司机。但是，如果投保的人或物能够自动向保险公司报告，保险公司也拥有大量有关外部环境的数据，那么这个过程就可以大大改进。随着手机、手表、无人机、汽车等设备里安装的传感器越来越多，收集的数据也不断增加，越来越多的活动能够实现实时的风险评估(尽管在缺乏风险汇聚和分担的情况下，要为某些风险寻求保险可能会变得过于昂贵而无法实现)。
Flock is not alone. Verifly, a New York startup, competes with it in America. Root, a car insurer, offers drivers insurance based on their minute-to-minute behaviour behind the wheel. It even offers a discount to Tesla drivers if their car spends plenty of time in autonomous mode. Slice, a San Francisco startup, lets its customers insure their houses and cars for the time they are used on services such as Uber and Airbnb. Trov, also from San Francisco, insures personal possessions for short periods. Flock并非一枝独秀。纽约创业公司Verifly是它在美国的竞争对手。汽车保险公司Root根据司机每一分钟的驾驶表现向他们提供保险。如果特斯拉车主花大量时间使用自动驾驶模式，Root甚至会给他们打折。当人们把自己的房屋和汽车用于优步和爱彼迎这类服务平台时，可以通过旧金山的创业公司Slice投保。另一家同样位于旧金山的公司Trov为个人财产提供短期保险。
Flock’s chief executive, Ed Klinger, says that he eventually wants to insure all kinds of future autonomous activities, from taxi rides to rolling delivery pods. He argues that selling insurance through annual premiums is inflexible. It less easily takes advantage of the large volume of live data that can now help estimate the risk posed by a given activity at a given time. For instance, a passenger in an autonomous taxi may be at far lower risk if the trip takes place outside rush hour, or in weather conditions in which the car performs at its best. Firms that dispatch delivery drones might use Flock to calculate the risk for each flight automatically, depending on cargo and address. Flock的首席执行官埃德·科林格(Ed Klinger)说，最终，他想要承保未来各种各样无人参与的活动，从无人驾驶出租车到带滚轮的送货机器人。他认为收年费卖保险不够灵活。这样不太容易利用大量的实时数据，而这些数据如今可帮助评估特定时间内由特定活动带来的风险。例如，如果在非高峰时段出行，或者出行时的天气状况最适合汽车行驶，那么乘坐自动驾驶出租车的乘客面临的风险要低得多。使用无人机送货的公司可能会用Flock来自动计算每次飞行的风险，这取决于货物和投递地址。
The business model is in its infancy, but on-demand insurance seems bound to grow. In a world where consumers expect push-button convenience from their services, they will demand the same of the insurance those services rely on. 这样的商业模式还处于起步阶段，但按需保险看来势必会增长。在如今的世界，消费者期望点击按钮就能方便地使用服务，他们也会对这些服务所依赖的保险提出同样的要求。
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