This research will provide anoverview of the insurance market and technology trends in South Korea. We will provide examples of insurers, insurtechs, and technology adoption in this country. In the previous editions of this research series, we covered Australia, New Zealand, Greater China, Japan,and Southeast Asia.
To provide an understanding of the market and insurtech trends in Korea, we begin with an overview of the market and regulatory structure in place today. And, we will highlight two Korean insurers’ profiles and their digital initiatives. Our aim is to introduce the structure and strategy taken by insurers to implement digital services for modernizing their operations. This will provide an insurer’s view on approaching innovation and their partnership or collaboration with insurtechs. We interviewed Hanwha Life and showcased AIA Korea through Celent’s Model Insurer case study.
From the insurer’s view, we will proceed to introduce a snapshot of insurtechs in Korea and showcase the digital insurance model that we observe to be a common trend among the companies we feature. Insurtechs include Carrot, Kakao Pay, Hana Financial Group; Shinhan EZ General Insurance; LifePlanet; BOMAPP; OpenPlan; Smallticket; Grade Health Chain, and Genexon.
Lastly, we will look at the infrastructure powering the insurers’ platforms and their migration to the cloud for innovation and development involving data and user experience. Because insurtechs are generally built on the SaaS model, they have adopted the cloud-based architectures from the beginning. We aim to provide an overview of government support and regulation, major cloud service providers in South Korea, and those providers’ strategies as international CSPs servicing the market. This includes a look at Naver Cloud Platform, NHN Cloud, KT Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
In conclusion, I will provide my perspective from the research into South Korea's insurance technology and insurtech landscape, including:
"Insurtechs are a growing group in Korea and are targeting the next generation of consumers in insurance, with mobile, embedded, and affordable products, supplemented with data analytics and enhanced user experience. Korea’s fintech landscape is growing, and the country has a sound IT and online financial infrastructure, with a supportive fintech policy. This sets the foundation for local market investment and for expansion globally." - Max Ang, Celent
