JULY 20188IN MY OPINIONInsurance Analytics--Barriers to ExploitationBy Douglas Duncan, CIO, Columbia Insurance GroupInsurance analytics, and in fact all business analytics, is about turning information into money. Monetization. How effective is this, and what are the barriers?Most companies are actively trying to improve this capability. According to a Novarica study, "Insurer IT Budgets and Projects 2018," for P&C Carriers, nearly 50 percent of mid-size and over 60 percent of large carriers surveyed are planning or implementing major enhancements and replacements in this area.Companies are making significant investments to improve this capability. Assuming the investment pays off and better information is available, how do we monetize this? Generally speaking, it is through superior pricing of risk, better understanding of a market or product, improved detection of fraud and waste, and increased efficiency of operations. Master these four topics and you can rule the world. In practice we face many challenges.If we can understand our information better, we can make better decisions based upon it. This is conventional wisdom, and is a great starting point. Why is this not happening as effectively as we wish?The Standards ProliferationHave you ever tried switching from one type of data warehouse to another? From one reporting and analytics suite to another? It can be messy, painful, and expensive.When we change our environments we impact our ability to extract meaning from the data. Every tool builds a framework around the data in order to properly analyze it, which requires extensive effort. Changing tools and environments is costly and often we lose nuances that are important.Artificial Intelligence and the Data Lake approach to storing and parsing huge sets of unstructured or poorly structured data promise a solution, but the technology is not yet mature.Douglas Duncan
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