Leveraging the power of data analytics
Data is an essential foundation for sound decision-making in any business. P&C (re)insurance claims teams have access to a great deal of data. That data may come from the company’s own policy administration system, from brokers or customers making claims, from loss adjusters, experts, consultants, market organisations, and feeds, of one kind or another, from a wide range of other external sources.
It may arrive in any of a variety of formats, from (very rarely) paper submissions or (more commonly) emails to any of a wide range of third-party feeds. Then, the process of moving claims from FNOL through to final resolution generates a lot more data along the way.
The data claims teams need to make intelligent business decisions which may be distributed across multiple systems, teams and locations. The data you need will all be out there somewhere. But unless it’s delivered to you in a format that actively aids intelligent decision-making, you’re effectively squandering a valuable resource.
Ultimately, data only attains its true potential value when translated into information – and thence into actionable insights. It might seem obvious, but it’s important to be clear about the distinction between data, information and insights. Data simply consists of the raw numbers captured in line with a common set of standards.
Turning that data into information involves processing, aggregating and organising it into a series of data points that can help us understand what we’re looking at. We only get insights once we have subjected this information to a process of analysis that helps us see what’s going on behind the data. Data is just numbers. Information tells us what is happening. Insights tell us why.
If you want to manage P&C (re)insurance claims effectively, just knowing what is not enough. You also need to understand why, so you can make the well-informed decisions required to deliver an improved service for your clients – and an improved bottom line for your business. To benefit fully, you need to be able to gain that understanding quickly and easily. You need those insights at your fingertips, without having to spend valuable time searching for them or wait for your BI or MI team to get back to you.
That’s exactly what the AI-enabled data analytics functionality in DOCOsoft’s CMS is designed to do. Our solution combines streamlined data collection with advanced analytics to give you meaningful, timely, actionable insights presented through a variety of clearly legible graphic visualisations.
With the constant pressure to turn claims around faster and achieve higher closure rates, the granular measurement of strengths and weaknesses in a team’s performance is an obvious advantage. We have made it easy to identify inconsistencies in areas like reserving and time taken to perform tasks readily, enabling claims managers to take prompt remedial action where appropriate.
Our software makes it easy for claims professionals who might otherwise be too focused on the detail of individual claims to see the big picture of higher-level reserving trends. It identifies reserve accuracy by the classification of business, carrier, handler, location, lead and following markets, third-party experts, and a range of other factors. This analysis also helps actuaries gain insight into lower-level trends.
Our data analytics functionality covers all the key areas into which P&C (re)insurance claims managers need insight, across financial trends, reserving accuracy and operational performance. By situating claims teams’ current workload within fine-grained, medium and long-term financial trends, our data analytics functionality makes it easy for claims managers to see how their team’s current workload maps against these trends.
Better data analytics can drive significant operational savings for claims departments in a number of ways. Applying advanced algorithms to the process of predictive analytics can help determine length of claim lifecycles, loss development and ultimate value. Our analytics solution can also help with claims triage and proactive settlement – with models predicting which claims should be settled quickly and which require senior claims professional’s attention. Meanwhile, claims leakage analysis can highlight inefficient processing practices.
Advanced data analytics capabilities can also help by generating the fine-grained historical and real-time reserve accuracy data that heads of claims need to satisfy their regulatory reporting obligations – as well as highlighting trends early that could indicate the need for a review of reserving strategy at a senior level.
Our machine-learning-powered analytics functionality can also help carriers avoid the financial costs that come with consistently over or under reserving, by detecting patterns that can help inform appropriate remedial action. It can also improve the accuracy of case reserves by assessing the relative reliability of different broker and expert reserve estimates. By feeding back timely, robust and granular information on the accuracy of case reserve to pricing teams, it can also help ensure that business written – particularly new and less familiar business – is priced appropriately.
Analytics focused on topic modelling can generate benefits across everything from risk mitigation intelligence – by identifying the proximate cause of accidents or incidents – to the identification of hidden connections between apparently distinct risks. By analysing multiple smaller claims that wouldn’t justify the attention of human experts our software can detect patterns in these claims to help inform future underwriting strategy. Analytics can also help reveal emerging risk trends and the potential for developing new products to cover these.
Always recognising that data comes into insurance claims operations in a wide variety of formats, our data analytics solution can take data – not just from more obvious sources like SCM, ECF financials and ECF lead reserve data – but from virtually any source that suits the way you work. Our system ingests all this data and analyses it to provide you with interactive visualisations that enable you to drill down into the granular detail of any area of operational challenge or opportunity.
We have designed our advanced data analytics solutions to empower claims managers to make the right decisions at the right time, by putting the insights they need at their fingertips – in the form of easily legible, endlessly interrogable visualisations. This makes it easier for claims managers to carry out their oversight responsibilities, while ensuring consistent service and optimum performance.
In all of this, the aim is to empower claims decision makers at all levels to make the best possible decision in every situation. For all of us in the world of insurance lack of data has never been the problem. But having the data is only the first step, making it work for you is what really matters. That’s what our next-generation AI-powered intelligent analytics can achieve.