金融科技搅局保险业之 迎难而上

《经济学人》述评：创业公司虽然很难撬动保险业，但依然迎难而上。...

手绘图：花菜菜

之前我们介绍过金融科技（fintech）对于传统银行业在借贷、支付、经济和数据分析领域的影响，但似乎对于保险业的搅局不多。《经济学人》于2016年1月30日撰发题为“Against the odds”的文章，分析了保险业难以撬动的两大原因，但同时指出已经有创业公司迎难而上。

文章分析，两大原因导致创业公司难以进入保险业：严格的监管是最主要的原因：对付重重监管考验（gauntlet of regulations）既费时又费力。文章援引Oscar（针对个人的在线医疗保险公司，成立于2012年）首席执行官Mario Schlosser的估计，如果今年成立一个创业公司，那么最早也得等到2018年才能走完监管流程、发行第一个保险产品；另一原因是资金要求（capital）。创业公司往往拿的是风投（venture capitalists）的钱，这些钱可以用来发工资（salaries）、开发系统（systems）、付办公室房租（bright and airy offices）以及员工福利餐（an eternal smorgasbord），但无法支持大量账户现金结余。所以很多创业公司尽量避免直接持有风险资产，更多充当第三方平台的角色。这样的制度安排不太适用保险——除非公司坚持做一个纯粹的中介第三方，否则它最终还是要承担风险以及随之而来的大额资金要求（weighty capital requirement）。另外客户只有对公司有足够的信心才会投保（take out policies），他们需要相信等理赔（claim）的时候公司还在。创业公司在这方面具有天然的劣势（by definition），因为他们没有良好的信誉记录来支持客户的信心。

虽然在一起不容易，文章还是了几个保险业的创业公司案例：P2P保险平台Lemonade；通过朋友圈众筹保险模式平台Guevara和Friendsurance。文章重点介绍了车险公司Metromile通过数据分析按照车辆里程数卖车险的例子：车险相对是个成熟的险种，而许多大公司也想方设法寻找最佳客户（cherry-pick）——把保险卖给最不可能出事故的司机，这些办法包括用设备或App统计司机的车速和踩急刹车的频率等因素。但是Metromile另辟蹊径，他们按照客户里程数卖车险，具体定价是基础价45-50美元一个月，另外每多1英里再加0.05~0.06美分，这基于他们之前的统计分析：里程数与出事故的概率有强关联，而且他们统计过，全美有7500万辆车几乎不开，但依然每年支付约730亿美元的保费。

金融科技就像个精明的野蛮人，就在门外。

封面选自Economist

彩蛋 - 学外语

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最近一段时间《经济学人》官网可能不太稳定。小编先做回搬运工，把原文附上。

还是原来的口号：相信厚积薄发的力量！欢迎大家多给反馈！SOME of the wiser words about the great American experiment—namely, the creation of a continent-sized country, governed of, by and for the people—were written by Louis Brandeis, a justice of the Supreme Court between 1916 and 1939. To Brandeis is owed the observation that the federal system often gains by letting each state, if its citizens so choose, serve as a “laboratory” of democracy, trying out new policies without imposing them on the whole country. Few have improved on Brandeis’s defence of free speech, written in 1927 after a Californian woman was jailed for speaking on behalf of a communist party. America’s founders, he argued, put their faith in reasoned discussion among citizens and believed that the “greatest menace to freedom is an inert people”. Thus, unless hateful speech poses an imminent danger, the remedy is “more speech, not enforced silence.”

The centenary of the Brandeis confirmation falls next month, sparking a flurry of scholarship. His confirmation by the Senate was bitterly contested by the standards of the day. Brandeis was the first Jewish justice, nominated by Woodrow Wilson amid some coded anti-Semitism (one critic accused him of “Old Testament” cruelty towards courtroom opponents). Others called him a dangerous radical: he was an outspoken foe of concentrated power, whether wielded by rival-crushing big businesses, or by remote and therefore clumsy big government.

A live political charge still flows through his words: indeed, with his views on tolerating speech that shocks, Brandeis might struggle to give a college commencement address in 2016 without provoking jeering protests. But in a time of populist, elite-bashing rhetoric, his beliefs about the “curse of bigness” are even more topical. To simplify, Brandeis urged intense scepticism when any leader—in politics or business—claims to have the general interest at heart, while at the same time constructing any agency or enterprise so large that it cannot be understood, efficiently managed or held to account by alert, responsible, ordinary citizens.

A fine new book, “Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet” by Jeffrey Rosen, describes how seriously the justice took these beliefs. Though eager to see big banks and businesses broken up to prevent monopolies, Brandeis turned on President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his young left-wing advisers when they used the New Deal to bring great swathes of the economy, including small farms, under central government control. Mr Rosen, who heads the National Constitution Centre in Philadelphia, describes Brandeis joining more conservative justices in striking down key planks of the New Deal in 1935. After that display of wrath, Brandeis summoned a presidential aide to hear a message for FDR. “This is the end of this business of centralisation,” he said, adding that “as for your young men…tell them to get out of Washington…back to the states. That is where they must do their work.”

Brandeis was brought up in Kentucky by a loving and bookish family of secular Jewish immigrants from Prague. His upbringing, which included three years of schooling in Dresden, left him with a distrust of high finance (bankers playing with “other people’s money”, he scowled), a fondness for small business and a horror of chain stores that was at once rather Germanic and powerfully influenced by Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America as a country of self-governing yeoman farmers.

Brandeis offers modern political lessons because his equal distrust of big corporations and big government puts him at odds with both political parties. The Republican-controlled Senate may be refusing even to hold hearings for Merrick Garland, the centrist judge nominated by Barack Obama to sit on the Supreme Court after the recent death of Justice Antonin Scalia. But if transported to the present, Brandeis (who died in 1941, aged 84) would not have a hope of nomination, let alone confirmation.

It is not just that the left would find Brandeis dismayingly unmoved by the ills of racism, and the right would find him too willing to read the constitution in the light of modern values and science. His real problem is simpler: both parties rather like some forms of bigness. To too many Democrats, calls for limited government sound like unilateral disarmament: they view federal authority as the only effective check on corporate power, big polluters or those who challenge civil rights. The policy platform of Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, is built on a tottering stack of federal regulations, tax credits and paper-spewing schemes to make a Brandeis weep. Meanwhile, too many Republicans make populist arguments about bullying officials and Washington pen-pushers, while turning a blind eye to years of mergers that have left some industries at the mercy of a few, exceedingly powerful, incumbents. One Republican, the putative presidential nominee Donald Trump, positively boasts that he will run the economy like a Putinesque strongman.

Chain-store politics

Even Brandeis’s passion for devolving power to accountable levels of government has been subverted by the forces of bigness. National interest groups have perfected the art of drafting cut-and-paste “model” bills, ready to be passed by pliant legislatures. Rather than acting as innovators in democratic laboratories, such groups look more like chain stores choosing locations for a new franchise. Gun lobbyists, say, know just which statehouse might buy their law allowing teachers to pack heat at school. Trade unions know in which cities to sell a minimum-wage ordinance.

Ordinary Americans have to take their democracy back from the political hacks and lobbyists, Brandeis might respond. Always suspicious of experts, he put his trust in enlightened citizens. Civic activism is hard in a busy, distracted, cynical age. But barriers to rallying like-minded campaigners are falling, too. The digital world might startle the stern and cerebral justice: he loathed newspapers filled with “gossip”. But if new laboratories of democracy are out there, Brandeis would surely bless them.

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