ANALYTICS IN INSURANCE: Start Fast, Accelerate Value
June 2, 2021
The insurance industry has always been a data-centric industry. It could be argued that the industry has historically acquired more expertise regarding data and the analysis of that data than any other industry. The actuarial and underwriting professions are solid proof of the centrality of data and analytics in the industry. But the world is changing rapidly. The mobile, digital, connected world now generates massive amounts of data every second, including an increasing variety of types of data from new sources. In addition to all of this new data, insurers possess vast amounts of proprietary data – much of which holds potential insights that are trapped in legacy systems and databases. This presents great opportunities for insurers to solve new types of problems with modern analytics tools and to approach traditional problems in new ways. Insurers will always need to create quantitative, factual reports on the state of the business, and most are quite good at this already. The new wave of analytics enables more frequent and even real-time views of the traditional reports, but more importantly, supports more qualitative assessments, along with predictive and prescriptive capabilities. This new era of analytics also allows for new types of questions that seek to find patterns or determine potential actions – questions that were once difficult to answer due to the cost and time related to the technologies available in the past.
