Hyperinflation, Currency Crises & Insurance Industry Collapse

Hyperinflation destroyed Zimbabwe’s insurance sector, and decades later, it still hasn’t recovered. Currency crises in Lebanon, Argentina, and Venezuela have crippled financial institutions, showing how fragile financial systems can be when trust in money itself disappears.

A recent discussion started as a tongue-in-cheek debate: Is inflation a more efficient way to raise revenue than taxation? But it evolved into a broader debate on monetary risk, Bitcoin, inflation, and long-term economic trends—and why so many common arguments deserve scrutiny.

How Inflation Impacts Insurance

Premiums & Inflation Risk
High inflation makes level premiums unworkable, erodes the real value of cover. Optional benefit increases create adverse selection problems in life insurance. Even constant percentage increases fail under volatile inflation, and real wage stagnation worsens affordability pressures.

Monetary Instability & Insurer Solvency
Currency collapses create huge challenges for insurers trying to meet liability obligations in real terms. When inflation spikes, reserves built on past assumptions become grossly inadequate, leading to solvency concerns and even industry-wide failure.

Crypto & Smart Contracts in Insurance
Blockchain has potential for parametric insurance, automated claims processing, and fraud reduction. But much of the excitement outpaces practical application—or solves problems that were already solved while not addressing key remaining challenges.
(And let’s be real—just because a smart contract auto-executes doesn’t mean lawyers won’t find ways to argue intent and “meeting of minds.†)

My (Cautious) View on Blockchain

I spoke at the 2016 ASSA Convention on Seductions of the Blockchain, and my position remains:

• Cautiously optimistic
• Interested in opportunities
• Frustrated by the lack of rigorous debate from both fanatics and skeptics

The fanboys see blockchain as a cure-all, while the status-quo-invested skeptics dismiss it entirely. Reality, as always, is more nuanced.

Key Arguments & Concerns

1 Inflation as an ‘Efficient’ Tax?

Some argue that taxes are administratively complex, difficult to collect, and inflation acts as an “invisible tax† that transfers wealth to the state with less friction.

The Problem? Inflation isn’t a neutral mechanism:

• Distorts price signals and makes long-term contracts unreliable.
• Increases uncertainty and raises borrowing costs.
• Disproportionately harms those without inflation-protected assets—often the poorest.
• Erodes trust in government’s ability to manage financial stability.

Hyperinflation isn’t just caused by overspending—it requires excessive money printing to cover deficits. Many governments (e.g., Japan, the US, and EU countries) have run huge deficits for years without hyperinflation because they borrow responsibly instead of monetising debt.

Friedman’s famous quote:
“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”

2 Bitcoin as a Predictable Alternative to Fiat?

Bitcoin proponents argue that a fixed supply prevents inflation and provides monetary certainty. But there’s a flip side:

The Problem? A rigid money supply is deflationary, which discourages spending and investment:

• BTC expansion (~0.9% today, falling below 0.5%) is well below global population and economic growth.
• Fixed-supply currencies have historically failed because economies need monetary flexibility to adjust to shocks.
• A deflationary currency discourages productive investment. If BTC’s price is expected to rise, why spend it? Why take out a loan?

This is why almost all mainstream economists—from Keynesians to monetarists—support some level of controlled monetary expansion.

Academic reference: Friedman advocated rules-based money supply growth, not a hard cap. Even Hayek, a proponent of free-market money, acknowledged the need for adaptable monetary systems.

A bigger issue: Some crypto coins have fixed supply, but the total universe of crypto coins is unlimited. New projects, forks, and tokens emerge constantly, meaning there is no true scarcity at a system-wide level.

3 Credit Risk & Smart Contracts – Who Pays When the Funds Aren’t There?

Smart contracts don’t solve credit risk. Traditional insurers must hold capital reserves and meet solvency requirements to ensure claims can be paid. Smart contract-based insurance lacks an equivalent safety net—yet.

Key Risks:

• No Guarantee of Payouts: If a smart contract is underfunded, it can’t issue emergency capital or negotiate claims—it just fails.
• Over-Collateralization Isn’t a Perfect Fix: Many DeFi protocols require excessive collateral to mitigate risk, but this limits scalability and locks up capital inefficiently. Actuarial approaches to capital adequacy could provide a smarter balance.
• Cascading Failures in Market Shocks: A major market downturn can cause mass liquidations, leading to systemic failures—just like traditional financial crises, but with fewer stabilizers.

Future Opportunity:

• As DeFi regulation increases, some form of capital adequacy requirements (like Solvency II for insurers) may emerge.
• Actuaries and insurance risk experts could play a role in designing smarter DeFi risk models.

Final Thought: Smart Contracts Are an Exciting Tool—but They Need More Work

Smart contracts introduce new efficiencies, but they also introduce new risks:
They remove intermediaries—but also eliminate safety nets.
They change fraud risk—but introduce oracle manipulation risk.
They enable fast, automated transactions—but don’t guarantee funds will always be there when needed.

For insurance, finance, and risk management, blind reliance on smart contracts is dangerous. But recent advancements show promise:

• Regulators are starting to provide legal clarity.
• Hybrid smart contracts (automated + human oversight) are emerging.
• Decentralized oracles & improved collateral models are evolving.

The real opportunity? Combining smart contract automation with actuarial risk management principles to build more resilient decentralized insurance solutions.

Would love to discuss with those working in insurance, risk management, DeFi, and blockchain regulation.

#Inflation #Blockchain #BTC #ETH #DeFi #DistributedLedger #MonetaryPolicy #FinancialRisk #Insurance #RiskManagement #Actuary #Economics #LegalRisk #ParametricInsurance

It’s likely that several of your own service providers will roll this out in the next couple of years. Progress, right?

The problem is that in the short time since voice identification models have become mainstream and slick enough to be used in call centers, voice spoofing technology has exploded. It is now trivial to create voice tracks saying whatever you want them to say without human ears being able to tell any difference, and increasingly, fooling the voice authentication models too.

Worse, we are probably only a few years from trivial video spoofing with the same qualities.

I support the idea of moving away from passwords and improving security, but I struggle to understand how voice authentication is anything other than a tiny blip in the timeline before it becomes the easiest vector for fraud yet.

The larger insurance players seem reluctant to enter the market. Why do you think this market has been slow on the uptake? The regulatory barriers to entry certainly don’t appear to be that restrictive so either existing insurance companies are not flexible enough to offer the products required or it’s a poor business decision/larger risk that they’re unwilling to take on. Do you have an opinion on what is causing the low number of microinsurance players in the market?

So here goes. Certainly a far from complete or perfect answer, but a starting point based on my discussions with many people and entities actively interested in pursuing the market over the last few years.

What do we mean by micro insurance in the South African context?

The issue with micro insurance is scale, particularly of distribution and distribution costs. Okay, followed closely by premium collections (and that is about maintaining scale so that you don’t lose insurance policies as quickly as you sell them). These are the two issues that need to be solved for real success for any new micro insurer or a new platform for micro insurance.

Micro insurance and funeral insurance

Whether micro insurance is big in South Africa or not comes down to how one defines “micro insurance†.  There are major life insurance players that have funeral products with modest premiums, below R100 or even R50 per month. So those large insurers (major traditional insurers plus the bancassurers) are operating in this space already, but as “assistance business† as the current licence category is termed.

Under some definitions, South Africa is already one of the largest micro insurance markets in the world. On other measures, there are still plenty of excluded people who could benefit from appropriately priced, appropriate value insurance on a micro scale. I still hope to see viable products with premiums below R10 per month (and not on some misleading bundled basis) or even less on a micro-transaction basis.

These players are less interested in the particulars of a micro insurance licence because they have yet to see a material benefit. Product restrictions and the complexity of an additional licence don’t warrant lower capital since they aren’t actually constrained by regulatory capital but rather by their own view of economic capital.

Distribution innovation

Some of these players have tried innovative products (pre-paid funeral plans, allowing skipping premiums) with low, no or at best moderate success. The bancassurers push heavily into ATM, USSD and call centre sales rather than branch sales because they are lower cost, and sometimes lower risk of anti-selection. Getting life insurance via the banking apps is an easy step (and some have taken it) so probably the view is that a dedicated app just for insurance is unnecessary.  The banking brands (target of popular complaints as they sometimes are) are still generally well trusted.

The traditional insurers have invested in their own distribution channels, more typically broker- or agent-driven, for decades and this has carved them a good, profitable niche. Changing that for revolutionary distribution has risks.

Fraud and anti-selection are key concerns when you have the ability to turn coverage on and off.  I think many insurers are quite nervous about this. I’d love to see someone dedicating a small pot (R25m or something, so significant enough to do something with, but small enough for major players not to declare a national emergency if I doesn’t work) and experiment with something and see how it goes.

Micro insurance for assets

On the non-life side it’s more a definite gap. Acquisition costs, risk selection, differentiated pricing, claims underwriting and fraud risk (very serious fraud risk!) are non-trivial things to overcome.

Underwriting / risk assessment at policy inception is an expensive exercise. Claims stage underwriting can be problematic from a customer experience perspective if the policyholder genuinely expected to be covered and wasn’t (in which case even refund of premiums paid doesn’t help them, and with that the insurer has likely already incurred a loss based on the claims assessment and administration costs).

Credit insurance and micro insurance – but are we doing it right?

Credit insurance is the one area that sidesteps many of these issues. Clearly established need, assessment of ability to pay, distribution and lower fraud. It’s a pit this is also one of the areas that has achieved such a bad reputation (much of it deserved) for charging high premiums and making super profits based on the lack of a good market. It feels like we should be doing better here.

It would be amazing if someone could also consider what sort of loss they’d be prepared to take on a pilot programme to see if our worst fears are realized for asset insurance outside of the credit insurance space.

All the other hot trends

I’m staying close to developments on what I term “hyper selection† and also peer-to-peer insurance.  Some of this may present opportunities to unleash micro insurance from its current constraints.  I haven’t yet seen developments that seem ready for prime time and which solve what I view as the fundamental problems. Hopefully someone is already quietly working on something incredible in this space.

Micro insurance – opportunity for society, opportunity for business or both?

But the real answer to your question is that the supposed huge potential of micro insurance is a little difficult to pin down in pure commercial terms. Most of the success stories of micro insurance in emerging markets and public-private partnerships, NGO programmes etc.  Many of these also fail even with an explicit return on capital requirement.  Solving these issues on acceptable commercial terms for insurers who already have a successful business is a big question mark.

So even with my belief that micro insurance and inclusive financial services is a good thing for society, it’s less clear to me that it’s an easy buck to make for insurers.

This is particularly relevant given the ambition of some InsurTech players to hyper select risks or price on many more factors than are traditionally used in order to gain a competitive advantage.   Thomas doesn’t argue that it will be individual insurers’ interests to allow adverse selection, but if these companies are successful it may then have implications for policy makers.

Incidentally, there are some interesting reasons for insurers themselves (with commercial interests) to be wary of selecting too well, counterintuitive as that may seem, but more on that for another time.

The book itself is a mixture of qualitative arguments and gentle reasoning with enough maths to keep you interested if you are that way inclined. I struggled to finish the book and found the points belaboured after a while.

The main reason I struggled with the book though is that I believe from the start it assumes its conclusion.- that “increased loss coverage is universally a good thing”.  I’m going to explain a little bit of that here. If you are going to read the book, it might be useful to have these thoughts in mind going into it and see whether you agree.

The premise of the book

Loss Coverage is defined as the expected amount of claims covered by insurance. They demonstrate that, under certain pricing and behavioural assumptions, more adverse selection leads to higher loss coverage.

The rationale is that without accurate pricing, some premiums will be set a level too high and some too low for the specific risk. Some good risks who feel the premium overstates their will decline cover. Since more of the higher risk customers are getting a good deal and recognise the good deal, they will retain cover. Since some of those high risk customers will have felt an accurate price was too high, there could be an increase in high risk customers with cover. They contribute disproportionately to loss coverage given their higher probability of claim and therefore overall loss coverage can go up.

These assumptions are not particularly robust and the book even deals with examples “taken to the logical extreme” that show no increase in loss coverage and a substantial decrease in the number of lives covered.

A limited view on the value of insurance

An increase in the loss coverage measure means that more claims are expected to be covered by insurance as a result of allowing some adverse selection. However, this is at the cost of fewer individual risks being covered by insurance in total.

The argument thus neglects part of the value of insurance. Having insurance, even if one is fortunate enough not to claim, allows a less anxious existence, and the ownership and use of precious assets that would be irrational without having transferred the risk to an insurer.

This not merely a “peace of mind” value. The ability to optimise one’s risk budget by reducing certain risks and taking on others allows for risk-taking and economic growth. Insurance exists in the first place because it is not efficient for individuals to bear their own risks without pooling or transfer.

Questionable measures on ultra high probability claims

Why is the “risk greatest for those with the highest probability of claiming”? Under certain definitions of risk that is the case. But it’s not universal. If the probability of claim is 100%, I’d argue there is no “risk” at all. That might be a trivial case, but what about where the probability is 75%?

This reminds me of a product idea I never liked – insurance for taxi tyres. Taxi tyres are a consumable item that are replaced sometimes two or three times per year. The risk of having to replace them slightly earlier than planned hardly feels like a risk worth insuring. The probability of claim is too high and the cost of the claim too low. Would optimal loss coverage have all of these tyres insured?

And the book?

The book should have been a paper. There isn’t enough there to warrant the length or the price, nor is it sufficiently interesting or amusing to want me to finish it.

Take deductibles for example. A deductible in an insurance claim decreases the number of claims an insurer has to deal with. More than that though, it reduces the claims where the administration costs of checking out the claim and paying it are large relative to the benefit to the policyholder. Sometimes these costs would have been larger than the claim itself.

In that case it does not make sense for the insurer to be processing and paying the claims – the increase in premiums required would be more than reasonable to policyholders.

Lemonade’s new “zero everything” removes the deductible and guarantees no premium increases for up to two claims per year. The reporting on this innovation has generally been silent on the practical reasons why this is hard for traditional insurers and easier for Lemonade.

Lemonade on the other hand explicitly recognise (or at least claim) that due to their AI-based claims underwriting process they can drive down costs and therefore manage small claims cost effectively.

This is important. Many complain about the lack of innovation in insurance. Removing deductibles isn’t innovation. Reducing costs to the extent it becomes viable is the step that enables differentiation and better value for customers.