Big Data, financial regulation and organizational trajectories in the insurance sector

While Big Data was long considered to constitute a revolution for the insurance industry, recent firm-level evidence suggests that its effects remain limited. In this paper, we argue that this results from the transformations of the regulatory framework in which insurance firms have evolved since the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. More precisely, our hypothesis is that the European Solvency II directive introduced a series of norms, modes of governance, instruments, hierarchies and statistical reasonings through which Big Data was gradually assimilated within the sector, thus resulting in incremental forms of change. This overall argument is based on a rich documentary analysis, and on interview data collected within two French insurance companies. Our findings contribute both to the study of the financial industry and to our understanding of the relationships between industrial change, economic regulation and organizational processes.