EXPOSURE Magazine Snapshots: The Analytics Driven Organization

This is a taster of an article published in the second edition of EXPOSURE magazine.  Click here and download your full copy now.

Farhana Alarakhiya, vice president, products at RMS, writes… In my recent article in EXPOSURE magazine, I was interested in exploring how firms in the insurance sector can move towards building a more analytics-driven organization.  Being analytics-driven translates to being an agile business, and in a turbulent market landscape, building underwriting agility is becoming critical to business survival.

There is no doubt we have seen revolutionary technological advances and an explosion of new digital data sources, which has reinvented the core disciplines of insurers over the past 15 years.  Many (re)insurers also see big data and analytics (BD&A) as a “silver bullet” to provide competitive advantage and address their current market challenges.

Similar to other industries who continue to invest heavily in BD&A to secure their position and open a new chapter of growth, the insurance sector is also ramping up investment, in open BD&A platforms. But although there is a real buzz around BD&A, what may be lacking is a big data strategy specifically for evolving pricing, underwriting and risk selection, areas which provide huge potential gains for firms.

With the opportunity for our industry to gain transformational agility in analytics now within reach, we need to be conscious of how to avoid DRIP, being data rich, but information poor, with too much focus being on data capture, management, and structures, at the expense of creating useable insights that can be fed to the people at the point of impact.  Regulation is not the barrier to success either, many other regulated business areas have transformed their business and gained agility through effective analytics.

Please read the full article in EXPOSURE magazine to discover more about the three main lessons insurers can learn from other businesses who have their BD&A recipe just right, but here’s a short summary:

Lesson #1 – Delivering Analytics to the Point of Impact

Being reliant on back office processes for analytics is common for insurers, but doesn’t work for a frontline healthcare worker, for example.  Data analysts are rare in this sector, because a healthcare worker has analytics designed around their role, to support their delivery.  If you look at a portfolio manager in the insurance sector, they typically work in tandem with an analyst to get relevant data, let alone insight, which compromises their ability to perform effectively.

Lesson #2 – Ensuring Usability

Recognizing the workflow of an analytics user and giving due consideration to the veracity of the data provided to reduce uncertainty is vital. Looking at our healthcare example, analytics tools used by doctors to diagnose a patient’s condition use standardized information – age, sex, weight, height, ethnicity, address – and the patient’s symptoms.

They are provided not with a defined prognosis but a set of potential diagnoses accompanied by a probability score and the sources. Imagine this level of analytical capability provided in real-time at the point of underwriting, where the underwriter not only has access to the right set of analytics, they also have a clear understanding of other options and underlying assumptions.

Lesson #3 – Integration into the Common Workflow

To achieve data nirvana, BD&A output needs to integrate naturally into daily business-as-usual operations. When analytics are embedded directly into the daily workflow, there is a far higher success rate of it being put to effective use.  With customer service technology, all the required systems are directly integrated into the customer agents’ software for a holistic view of the customer.  Using platforms built and designed with open architecture allows legacy systems or your specific intellectual property-intensive processes to be integrated, for access to analytics that allow them to derive insights as part of the daily workflow for every risk they write.

This is a taster of an article published in the second edition of EXPOSURE magazine.  Click here and download your full copy now.

Watch Video: Farhana Alarakhiya – The Data Challenge Is Getting It to the Right People

Farhana Alarakhiya, vice president, products at RMS, said insurers are responding to the allure of big data, but must focus on turning voluminous data into meaningful insights. Alarakhiya spoke with A.M. BestTV at the Exceedance 2017 conference.