Nowadays digitalization is one of the key drivers of insurance market development in Russia. Introducing InsurTech provides insurance companies with a number of competitive advantages, such as increasing speed of making decisions, opportunities for portfolio expansion, tools for risk assessment and fraud detection. Application of digital technologies helps them to increase effectiveness of business processes. Among all business processes of an insurance company we emphasize the most significant in terms of insurance service provision. Those include the processes of underwriting, conclusion and support of an insurance contract, settlement of an insured event. However, adoption of innovations blurs borders between business processes. The paper discusses InsurTech tools implemented in these business processes, evaluates the effectiveness of their use, identifies the associated risks. The conclusion is made that the risk of unauthorized access or use of personal data is the most significant. Another significant risk is the model risk arising from the imperfection of the models used, insufficient data or its poor quality. In addition to that, the impact of digitalization on the activities of insurance companies and its business processes should not be overestimated. Funding: The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 20-01-00785.

China’s modern insurance market is the largest in the world in terms of several key indicators: both the number of contracts concluded and the volume of premiums collected. At the same time, insurance products related to property insurance are the second most popular among the population. However, the development curve of the insurance market in China is significantly different from the trajectories of changes in the insurance markets in Europe or the United States. This article is a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of insurance relations in the Chinese market under the influence of various factors, such as changes in the macroeconomic environment, the introduction of innovative technologies and the COVID-19 pandemic. During the transition from a planned economic system to a market one, as well as after China’s joining the WTO, external economic factors changed the development trends of China’s insurance industry. Based on the data of the National Bureau of Statistics of China for 2007–2020 and the Wind database, the authors built an econometric model that allowed analyzing the impact of various factors on the growth of property insurance in China. Special attention is paid to the impact of modern trends associated with the active introduction of digital technologies and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) on the development of the property insurance segment. The ongoing optimization of the system of insurance protection of the property of the population is primarily due to its risk management function. China’s experience in the development of insurance relations in the national market may be in demand in Russia, which belongs to countries with a developing insurance market.

The pandemic of the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has a huge impact on the global economy, significantly affecting the functioning of all its sectors. In this regard, the search for ways to minimize the negative consequences of such risks is of particular relevance. The article presents the results of a systematic analysis of scientific publications by leading foreign and Russian authors on various aspects of the risks arising from viral threats, as well as ways to reduce the negative consequences of such risks. In particular, studies that evaluate the impact on the economy of various factors that occur during and after epidemics are examined. The analysis of publications showed that researchers distinguish the following factors: 1) the social system of the state; 2) government expenses on the fight against the epidemic; 3) the role of international organizations in combating epidemics in individual countries. Further, various approaches to the construction of models describing the spread of biological threats reflected in publications of representatives of various scientific fields, in particular medical and economicmathematical, including actuarial, modeling are analyzed. Three approaches to modeling the development of infectious diseases are considered, which differ both in the apparatus used and in the predominant field of application of the corresponding models. Particular attention is paid to the contribution that insurance research can make to the development of new theoretical approaches to mitigate the negative economic consequences of COVID-19. The authors distinguish three areas: 1) the use of actuarial models for the analysis and assessment of the risks of biological threats; 2) the use of relevant insurance products in the insurance market as an epidemic risk management tool that provides financial protection; 3) the use of innovative technologies in rendering insurance services (InsurTech).