Big Data Analytics, Insurtech and Consumer Contracts: A European Appraisal

The article investigates, from the European perspective, to what extent the enhanced availability of granular data to insurance companies and the growing sophistication of insurers’ processing capabilities through big data analytics (BDA) are fostering the increasing personalization of insurance products and services for consumers. To this purpose, the article first explores the very notion of ‘automated personalization’ in insurance, and then delves into the institutional, epistemic, economic and legal factors that, in Europe, work as a constraint, at least in the short-term, to paradigmatic shifts in insurance consumers contracts. The analysis will hopefully demonstrate that automated personalization in consumer insurance contracts, in Europe, is for the time being more a myth than a reality. What does exist, by contrast, is a no less problematic trend towards mass customization and robotization of consumer insurance contracts, which fully deserves lawyers’ attention.