Digitisation accelerated by Covid-19 will change the insurance industry forever
Intelligent automation and technologies such as natural language processing
(NLP) can help. In the UK for example, Zurich is working to create digital
mailrooms with all paper mail scanned and routed digitally on arrival;
everything is delivered to a central location, scanned and put into a
workflow, with links emailed to the appropriate teams. Apply Intelligent
Character Recognition (ICR) and NLP to that process, and you can start to
automatically triage and respond to documents. If you have a medical or legal
file coming in that might be hundreds of pages long, a good NLP engine can
extract and highlight the relevant information before securely passing it on
to an assessor. The machine doesn’t make the decision, but it does a
‘pre-read’, which is a huge help to the assessor (who still has access to the
full file), who can then spend more time where the real value is, in assessing
the claim. It removes the admin work, and the NLP is continually learning and
updating, based on changes made by the assessor. Of course, the first step
here is digitising the paper process in the first place — something that the
current climate has made necessary, but the benefits of which will far outlive
the pandemic.
The TLS 1.2 Deadline is Looming, Do You Have Your Act Together?
Together with its precursor SSL, TLS has long been in the crosshairs of both
attackers and security researchers who understand that a weak or non-existent
deployment of the protocol makes it trivial enough to carry out
man-in-the-middle and other attacks against the vulnerable target. In the last
five years, SSL/TLS has been one of the most likely components tied to branded
vulnerabilities, a la Heartbleed, POODLE, BEAST, DROWN, you name it. This
high-profile activity has driven the crypto community to keep working hard to
refine TLS. It’s why the biggest standards bodies and regulators, including
the Internet Engineering Task Force, the National Institute for Standards and
Technology, and the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council, mandate
that operators of web servers ensure that they’re using the most up-to-date
version of the protocol, TLS 1.2 before the end of 2020. Additionally, TLS 1.0
and 1.1 have been (or are in the process of being) deprecated in one way or
another by major browsers. This means that major web browsers are also
planning on turning the screws to organizations in the latter half of 2020,
warning that they’ll soon throw up browser warnings when a user visits a site
that doesn’t support TLS 1.2.
Microsoft's Android smartphone launcher just got a major makeover
To use the Microsoft Launcher app, your phone needs to be Android 7.0 or
higher. But there's only so much a launcher can do, as Microsoft explains.
"You must download Microsoft Launcher from Google Play Store. Downloading
Microsoft Launcher will replace the default launcher. Microsoft Launcher does
not replicate the user's PC home screen on the Android phone. Users must still
purchase and/or download any new apps from Google Play," Microsoft
notes. There are a few glitches with the app still. Android 10
navigation gestures may not work on all phones, and system-level dark theme
only works on Android 8.0 and above. Sticky notes sync issues may occur after
upgrading to v6 and notification badges may need to be enabled again after the
upgrade. Microsoft announced the Launcher update as part of the new
Windows 10 build 20170 preview release. This preview for Windows Insiders in
the Dev Channel is currently not available for PCs with an AMD processor due
to a "bug impacting overall usability of these PCs". There's a new experience
for sound settings at Settings > System > Sound > Manage sound
devices. It lets users know which device is default and to pick a sound device
as your default device or default communication device.
How Do CIOs Feel About a Return to On-Premises Work?
“The timelines are all over the map and subject to change. And sometimes
frankly, they are meaningless for parents, if safe childcare or eldercare are
not available. In this context, what date is chosen doesn’t matter but
employer flexibility is of paramount importance,” said former CIO Joanna
Young. CDO Jay Brodsky is concerned “about employees with families and the
lack of adequate childcare options this summer.” For this reason, “planning
must consider childcare and caring for people who might be high risk. There
are a lot of considerations,” said CIO Martin Davis. Former CIO Michael Kail
added, “I can't even get a haircut yet, so I am not sure how one plans to
return to any semblance of on-premises work.” However, CIO David Seidl said,
“In specific disciplines, we're getting ready. This includes wiring, classroom
upgrades, network maintenance and limited tech support. We're handling delayed
maintenance in physically distanced ways with safety measures in place. But
how soon will we be back in a more significant way? There's a lot still up in
the air. We are doing well with work from home for most of our IT
organization. We'll be part of the overall planning and process.”
Haskell Web Framework IHP Aims to Make Web Development Type-Safe and Easy
While working through the software lifecycle we could see certain problems
happen over and over. Especially quality issues when working with very dynamic
languages and issues related to package-management. So we set out to solve
these problems. While a lot of people think that the choice of programming
languages does not matter, we believe that technology choices vary in power
and have a strong impact on the product. We have looked at a lot of different
technologies and found Haskell to be a great fit for our aim of highest
quality software engineering and developer happiness. While Haskell is a great
language, we could not find a really good framework to work with. We have been
looking for something opinionated, well documented, and easy to get started
with. After evaluating some solutions we decided to build it ourselves. The
same process lead us to pick nix as our primary package management solution:
We want our developers to be able to switch projects very quickly. We intended
to make a completely standardized development environment.
Data Science: Why Humans Are Just as Important as Math
No amount of stress-testing could have prepared even the most sophisticated
machine learning models for the extreme data variation that we’ve witnessed in
the past few months. Analysts and data scientists have had to step in to
calibrate models. The ability to apply a critical lens to data and insights is
not one we can readily teach machines. Overlooking this important step of the
process leaves us susceptible to falling into the hubris of big data and
making decisions that miss important elements of context. For example, we saw
an increase in demand for nonperishable foods across the supply chain, but
once everyone has stockpiled their pantries, they’re unlikely to buy these
items in similar quantities in the coming months. This will naturally lead to
a drop in demand that we must prepare algorithms for, instead of automatically
continuing to operate production lines as if such demand is the new normal.
Another example is a machine learning application in cybersecurity, in which
an algorithm may monitor for threats against a retailer’s website. To the
model, a sudden tenfold increase in website visits may seem like an attack;
but, if you were to factor in that it coincided with the retailer launching
mask sales, you have the context to understand and accept the uptick in
traffic.
New wave of attacks aiming to rope home routers into IoT botnets
This trend is concerning for several reasons. Cybercriminals are competing
with each other to compromise as many routers as possible so they can be
conscripted into botnets. These are then sold on underground sites either to
launch DDoS attacks, or as a way to anonymize other attacks such as click
fraud, data theft and account takeover. Competition is so fierce that
criminals are known to uninstall any malware they find on targeted routers,
booting off their rivals so they can claim complete control over the device.
For the home user, a compromised router is likely to suffer performance
issues. If attacks are subsequently launched from that device, their IP
address may also be blacklisted – possibly implicating them in criminal
activity and potentially cutting them off from key parts of the internet, and
even corporate networks. As explained in the report, there’s a thriving black
market in botnet malware and botnets-for-hire. Although any IoT device could
be compromised and leveraged in a botnet, routers are of particular interest
because they are easily accessible and directly connected to the internet.
BBVA explores quantum computing for banking
According to BBVA, the advancement is thanks to qubits, as opposed to bits, in
traditional computing. “Qubits exponentially increase the computing capacity
compared to classical computing. If the bits can perform calculations based on
two possibilities (1 and 0), qubits can run calculations on all the possible
combinations between 1 and 0 in parallel,” said the bank. Early results in the
project show that quantum computing can resolve some complex problems quickly,
accurately and efficiently, said BBVA. “Although this technology is still in
an early stage of development, its potential to impact the sector is already a
reality,” said Carlos Kuchkovky, BBVA global head of research and patents.
“Our research is helping us to identify the areas where quantum computing
could represent a greater competitive advantage, once the tools have
sufficiently matured. We believe this will be, for certain concrete tasks, in
the next two to five years.” A test done by BBVA’s team on the use of the
technology for investment portfolio optimisation showed that it could be
considerably faster when there are more than 100 variables in a calculation.
But the advantages could be the same for less complex calculation as quantum
hardware advances, said BBVA.
Wirecard Fraud Is Risk Management Lesson For Fintech Companies
Financial companies are expected to adopt a risk management program that
provides a thorough and consistent evaluation of the nature and extent of
risks to which they are exposed. Central to this is Enterprise Risk Management
(ERM) which articulates and codifies how an organization approaches and
manages risk. The tenets of an ERM framework include articulating risk
appetites, putting formal policies into place, conducting risk assessments,
establishing strong internal controls, and ensuring oversight by both senior
management and boards of directors. Wirecard’s 2018 Annual Report had
extensive disclosure of its “efficiently organized [enterprise] risk
management system.” The weaknesses that were confirmed later in the company’s
internal control and governance procedures remind fintech managers of the
challenges that must be overcome to make risk management truly operational in
a dynamic technology-driven firm. For risk management to be effective,
management and the board must own and address it, and the risk management
system supported by a healthy risk culture throughout the group.
Innovation Startups Modeling Agile Culture
So far, we have considered the concept of a data-driven startup. It should
also be noted that the data itself means nothing to a company. So, what is the
real purpose of analyzing huge amounts of data? It is to create valuable
information, intelligence, Business Intelligence, that can efficiently connect
a company with the market and its customers. This is a key point—every
innovation startup knows the importance of collecting the right data to
convert it into intelligence. The value of the Business Intelligence a startup
provides in huge markets like the buildtech sector is the value of the service
it provides. We all know what Business Intelligence is, but it is not easy to
provide an example. So, here’s an example of how a data-driven startup focuses
its business evolution on the intelligence it can generate. “Building
Intelligence” is a fake company name in this example of a real startup in the
buildtech sector. The vision of Building Intelligence is to avoid higher costs
and overtime in construction projects due to failures. Nowadays, this company
works over a SaaS, taking photos of construction sites, creating 3D models,
and comparing them with the architectural plans.
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