The Datafied Customer Relationship in Behavioural Life Insurance

This article-based dissertation examines ‘behavioural life insurance’, a novel insurance technology that implements self-tracked data and digital health services to improve risk prediction, pricing and management. As a widely circulated example of the possible effects of datafication, behavioural insurance policies have been both celebrated and criticized for their potential to disrupt the insurance industry. However, in this polarized debate, little attention has been paid to how the promises of personalization materialize in situated practices of developing the products and in policyholders’ experiences.

This research scrutinizes these aspects of novel insurance technologies by examining two Finnish behavioural life insurance products. Following the practice-oriented literature streams of sociology of insurance, sociology of markets and research focusing on people’s everyday engagements with algorithmic technologies, this study analyses Finnish insurers’ experimentation with behavioural life insurance products and the aims and ideas behind the development work. Furthermore, it examines the ways in which policyholders weave new insurance products into their everyday lives and experience the health interventions that they perform. By combining these perspectives, this dissertation analyses how behavioural life insurance (market) is co-constituted with the new (data) relations between insurers and policyholders.

The study is based on fieldwork that was conducted in 2017−2019 in two Finnish insurance companies. The data consist of 16 interviews with insurance professionals, 11 focus group discussions with real and potential policyholders and participant observations in the insurance professionals’ meetings. Furthermore, these data were supplemented with publicly available document data and reflections on testing the services. The analysis was conducted by juxtaposing and thematically analysing these varied empirical materials.

The study shows that instead of risk and premium personalization, Finnish insurers focus more on the promises of datafication to enable effective risk management and more intimate customer relationships. Seamless alignment between company and policyholder goals is, however, difficult to achieve. The data-driven technologies do not readily encompass customers’ lives; interventions experienced as helpful in one situation might feel intrusive and annoying in another. Thus, these technologies can fail to enhance customers’ autonomy and enact trustworthy data relations, rendering the disturbing sides of algorithmic control visible. The study shows that instead of a straightforward story of digital disruption, the emergence and success of a new insurance technology depends on human labour and the connections that are created in the process. However, these new data relations are prone to breakages and do not stabilize if behavioural policies fail to consider customers’ feelings and values in a satisfying way.