216 L McFall
promotional assemblage and they are still designed to work together to
repeat, reinforce, and amplify core messages across platforms. This work,
and how it is accomplished, can have significant effects on urban environments. Aviva’s investment in property around Hoxton Square is a major
boost to gentrification in London’s East End. This ‘creative tech washing,’
as Zed Nelson’s film describes, changes the character of the area, raising
rents and crowding out long-term residents and traditional businesses.
Insurtech, like insurance, is a double facing enterprise that trades businessto-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B). The B2B market
involves selling services to businesses but it also involves trade with investors and capital markets. This means engineering circuitous relationships
between inward and outward investment strategies that draw on brand narratives that are expressed through the languages of print, platforms, architecture, interior design, etc. This activity shapes the character of the built
environment in ways that can sometimes be impossible to miss and other
times almost impossible to see.
Notes
1 Life insurance in the United Kingdom, but usually not elsewhere, was known
as life assurance. I use the term life insurance except when referring explicitly
to British companies.
2 This is a strategy that, as Geiger (2019) demonstrates, persists in some companies notably in the notorious and now collapsed digital health enterprise
Theranos.
3 Industrial life assurance is distinct from mainstream ‘ordinary life assurance.’
Ordinary life offices did not sell industrial policies but many industrial offices
sold ‘ordinary branch’ policies which were effectively a hybrid between the
two policy types.
4 More detail on The Economist’s figures is provided in McFall (2014).
5 All industrial companies offered ‘ordinary’ monthly premium policies as well
as industrial policies.
6 See also the project site of Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal
America https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/44.34/-90.945&
text=intro.
7 See https://tracxn.com/d/emerging-startups/top-internet-first-insurance-startups-2020 https://www.ft.com/content/58c42412-3e91-46d4-833e-1e11806c5057.
8 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Q8SyuHWc0&t=25s.
9 Lemonade is 5 Years Old! Here’s Our Strategy and Results to Date; https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Q8SyuHWc0&t=25s.
10 https://scprojects.co.uk/case-study/aviva-digital-garage-london/.
References
Alborn, T.L 2002, ‘The first fund managers: Life insurance bonuses in Victorian
Britain’, Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 65–92.
Aviva 2021, ‘Timeline,’ viewed 2 May 2021,
promotional assemblage and they are still designed to work together to
repeat, reinforce, and amplify core messages across platforms. This work,
and how it is accomplished, can have significant effects on urban environments. Aviva’s investment in property around Hoxton Square is a major
boost to gentrification in London’s East End. This ‘creative tech washing,’
as Zed Nelson’s film describes, changes the character of the area, raising
rents and crowding out long-term residents and traditional businesses.
Insurtech, like insurance, is a double facing enterprise that trades businessto-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B). The B2B market
involves selling services to businesses but it also involves trade with investors and capital markets. This means engineering circuitous relationships
between inward and outward investment strategies that draw on brand narratives that are expressed through the languages of print, platforms, architecture, interior design, etc. This activity shapes the character of the built
environment in ways that can sometimes be impossible to miss and other
times almost impossible to see.
Notes
1 Life insurance in the United Kingdom, but usually not elsewhere, was known
as life assurance. I use the term life insurance except when referring explicitly
to British companies.
2 This is a strategy that, as Geiger (2019) demonstrates, persists in some companies notably in the notorious and now collapsed digital health enterprise
Theranos.
3 Industrial life assurance is distinct from mainstream ‘ordinary life assurance.’
Ordinary life offices did not sell industrial policies but many industrial offices
sold ‘ordinary branch’ policies which were effectively a hybrid between the
two policy types.
4 More detail on The Economist’s figures is provided in McFall (2014).
5 All industrial companies offered ‘ordinary’ monthly premium policies as well
as industrial policies.
6 See also the project site of Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal
America https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/44.34/-90.945&
text=intro.
7 See https://tracxn.com/d/emerging-startups/top-internet-first-insurance-startups-2020 https://www.ft.com/content/58c42412-3e91-46d4-833e-1e11806c5057.
8 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Q8SyuHWc0&t=25s.
9 Lemonade is 5 Years Old! Here’s Our Strategy and Results to Date; https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Q8SyuHWc0&t=25s.
10 https://scprojects.co.uk/case-study/aviva-digital-garage-london/.
References
Alborn, T.L 2002, ‘The first fund managers: Life insurance bonuses in Victorian
Britain’, Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 65–92.
Aviva 2021, ‘Timeline,’ viewed 2 May 2021,