Business analytics has quickly caught on across the insurance industry. For businesses adept at assessing and reducing risk, the technology promises to unlock never before seen capabilities.
It’s important to find a business analytics solution built for insurance. Business analytics applies to industries of all kinds and insurance companies require dedicated pre-built solutions to support the unique data used in insurance. WaterStreet Business Intelligence is tailored to fit today’s P&C insurance companies, backed by decades of insurance industry experience.
How Does Business Analytics Work?
Business analytics works by bringing your company’s data into a cohesive, single solution and then visualizing the data for simple drill-down abilities. The solution to apply business analytics is often referred to as Business Intelligence.
Insurance companies without business analytics run into the issue of disparate and siloed data, meaning the company’s most important data is not ready or presentable in meaningful formats. By merging this data together under one analytics solution, the company is able to contextualize and understand the data for proactive mindsets when making decisions.
Manually reviewing the company’s data without an analytics solution is often time-intensive and error-prone. Business analytics is made possible by removing the barriers between disparate and siloed data, allowing the business to access advanced reporting and learnings in simple, easy to use formats.
How is Business Analytics Used in Insurance?
Business analytics is used in insurance to raise confidence around decision making. It can be used within all departments and by executive leadership. Business analytics unveils patterns across the company’s data, including customer behavior and profitability.
Dashboards within the solution pull data from across the company, merging this data for advanced insight. The dashboards are designed to give you high-level overviews into the success of the company and to drill down further to view details influencing trends in the data.
All necessary standard reports are available for fast and simple generation, saving administrators and managers an immense amount of time each month. Users of the solution are also able to create new company-specific reports, tailored to the company’s needs.
Many insurance businesses today without analytics still rely on gut decisions and cultural practices, leaning into the company’s proven strengths without knowing where the data is headed. Having access to business analytics adds confidence to decisions across the company with easily accessible and interpretable insights, future-proofing the business.
7 Top Uses of Business Analytics in Insurance
1. Detect Fraud
Business analytics is excellent at detecting fraud. The WaterStreet Business Intelligence Platform contains anomaly detection for automatically flagging when data is irregular. Claims managers can easily drill down into anomalies to pursue fraud.
2. Integrate Third-Party Data
Cloud technology has opened many possibilities for integrating third-party data. The Internet of Things has influenced the insurance industry to collect customer data, such as with flood sensors in the home to identify the first signs of water damage. Telematics is influencing the auto insurance industry, leading carriers to collect driver data for better forming risk pools. Geolocation data has made leaps and bounds beyond ZIP codes as insurers today can gain access to detailed maps and geographical details surrounding insured homes. All of this data can be brought together under one analytics solution, greatly improving underwriting, product development, claims management and more.
3. Keep Up with Regulatory Compliance
To keep up with regulatory compliance, carriers can greatly benefit from many automatic reporting features. As regulatory compliance evolves to catch up with data collection, it’s important for insurers to be prepared to create regulatory reports without the need to add time to developing these reports. Business analytics allows companies to keep up with regulatory compliance in manageable and seamless ways.
4. Improve Underwriting
Underwriting relies on many forms of data, from written notes and video to maps and statistics. Business analytics saves underwriters time both collecting and understanding this information. Underwriters can review customer credit history, new risk factors, market information and more while combining this data with scenario modeling. Underwriters can also review claims data seamlessly, adjusting risk against previous claims. Business analytics benefits underwriters to improve the bottom line and remain competitive at precise, calculated levels.
5. Measure the Success of Products
Product managers have greatly improved abilities to measure the success of products with business analytics. Through monitoring high-level trends and drilling into granular details of product performance, product managers can identify which products are the most or least profitable, who is selling them, where they are selling them, and key behaviors of the policyholders buying the products. The deepest level of understanding is made possible for product performance, arming product managers with visualized projections and considerations to create new products, discontinue old products or pivot the marketing strategy for current products.
6. Reduce Customer Churn
Gain customer insights on who is buying your products and how they are buying them. Carriers and agents have access to improved customer profiles paired with claims and underwriting data. Identify bottlenecks in customer experience to improve the company’s relationship with loyal customers. Find trends in retention and consider new ways of retaining customers, such as through faster claims processing, bundling or considerations for new products.
7. Reduce Claims Costs
Claims managers have simplified access to quality claims data, presented in quick-review formats for efficiently reviewing claims and comparing claims in visualizations. One great benefit to using business analytics for claims management is to reduce litigation expenses. Claims managers are able to view the estimated cost of litigation expenses against similar claims cases and settle before the cost outweighs the company’s chance of recouping losses.
WaterStreet Business Intelligence
WaterStreet is a proud Microsoft Gold Partner and utilizes Azure platform services to deliver our Business Intelligence Solution.
Our insurance data warehouse model design follows industry-proven dimension-modeling standards, and stores data at the lowest possible level of granularity. Concise policy information is detailed down to the coverage and risk parameter level. Claim information includes individual payments, historical reserve estimates and full tracking of claim status changes.
We know the challenges that carriers face in managing business because we come from the insurance industry.
Ready to Take Action?
Reach out to WaterStreet Company today to request a consultation and demo of our solutions.
