![]() ![]() ![]() The US and UK governments and the European Union have recently launched “open data” websites to make available massive amounts of government statistics, including health, education, worker-safety, and energy data, among others. Recently, the release of previously unavailable or inaccessible public-sector data has greatly expanded potential sources of third-party data. Digital “data exhaust” from social media and multimedia, smartphones, computers, and other consumer and industrial devices-used within privacy guidelines and assuring anonymity-has become a rich source for behavioral insights for insurance companies, as it has for virtually all businesses. The proliferation of third-party data sources is reducing insurers’ dependence on internal data. New sources of external data, new tools for underwriting risk, and behavior-influencing data monitoring are the key developments that are shaping up as game changers. In the future, the creative sourcing of data and the distinctiveness of analytics methods will be much greater sources of competitive advantage in insurance. We are entering a period when this picture will change. Historically, competitors achieved significant performance differentiation mainly by combining scale of exposures and underwriting expertise. The key for insurers is to motivate their highly skilled experts to adopt the newest tools and use them with creativity, confidence, and consistency. Technology, as everyone knows, changes much faster than people. While the impetus to invest in analytics has never been greater for insurance companies, the challenges of capturing business value should not be underestimated. The overall effect of these developments will be greater depth and breadth of analytics talent throughout organizations, significant improvements in management processes, and new products that deliver greater value to customers and to society. Life insurers and property-and-casualty insurers have lagged behind other financial-services sectors, but they are now catching up in their adoption of predictive and optimization models in business processes such as sales, marketing, and service. Now a new wave of innovation and applications of advanced analytics is emerging in all types of product lines and business functions. Chad Hemenway, “Massachusetts law bans credit scoring for auto insurance,” Propert圜asualt圓60, November 30, 2011, propertycasualt圓60.com. While the use of credit scores in private-auto-insurance underwriting has been a contentious issue for the industry with consumer groups, the addition of behavioral and third-party sources was a significant leap forward from the claims histories, demographics, and physical data that insurers analyzed in the past. Instead of relying only on internal data sources such as loss histories, which was the norm, auto insurers started to incorporate behavior-based credit scores from credit bureaus into their analysis when they became aware of empirical evidence that people who pay their bills on time are also safer drivers. Today’s advanced analytics in insurance push far beyond the boundaries of traditional actuarial science.Ĭonsider how this has affected underwriting in personal auto insurance. Over the past 15 years, however, revolutionary advances in computing technology and the explosion of new digital data sources have expanded and reinvented the core disciplines of insurers. Indeed, the analytics performed by actuaries are critically important to an insurer’s continued existence and profitability. Actuaries using advanced math and financial theory to analyze and understand the costs of risks have been the stalwarts of the insurance business forever.
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