While we often emphasize that we're about thought leadership, not news, this week I'll focus on two items in the news.
The first is about an investment in and partnership involving...ITL. We don't often look for headlines about ourselves, but we hope this partnership will turn out to be the most important thing we've done since our founding.
We are announcing today that The Institutes have made an investment in ITL as part of a strategic relationship. I trust you're all familiar with The Institutes' continuing education courses and their offerings of professional designations, including the CPCU. I hope you also know about their RiskBlock consortium, which is leading the way for the industry on developing blockchain applications in insurance. If not, you should—assuming you would benefit from blockchain in your future.
We will help The Institutes broaden the creation and distribution of thought leadership on innovation and technology, supporting the industry's transformation goals. At the same time, they will help us spread our wings among their members, both in terms of ITL and in terms of our Innovator's Edge platform for tracking insurtechs and our Innovator's Studio strategy coaching services.
As you might imagine, we're in the very early days of coordinating the new relationship, but there will be plenty more to say both from our vantage point and theirs in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned.
Second news item is the story about Spectre, Meltdown and the flaw in Intel microprocessors that opens up a whole new attack vector that the bad guys can use to get to information they shouldn't have. The issue reads like rocket science—a whole series of illicit commands can be slipped into the work stream of the processor, but only if they are timed to the billionth of a second—and it just so happens that we have a rocket scientist on staff: Joe Estes, our Chief Technology Officer, who is a veteran of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab.
Joe has written an article that I want to call to your attention because it provides a timely explanation on a complex but important topic. (I feel smarter already.) The article also draws on research in our Innovator's Edge platform, where we are tracking 250 insurtech startups focused on cyber issues. Joe lays out the three main approaches that insurtechs are making and recommends a few to check out. I recommend the piece highly.
Cheers,
Paul Carroll,
Editor in Chief
