Montoux recently joined fellow AWS Partners FINEOS and Verisk on an Amazon Partner Network (APN) TV virtual roundtable entitled ‘Cloud-Enabled Analytics in Insurance: Drive business growth and innovation by harnessing data.’ The discussion addressed how insurers can better utilize data and analytics to drive innovation and sustainable growth. It also touched on how access to new data technologies, data architecture, and the cloud are fundamentally changing how insurance carriers interact with their customers.
You can register to view the on-demand APN TV roundtable discussion here.
Presented By:
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Speakers included:
- Geoff Keast, CEO at Montoux
- Vikas Vats, Chief Analytics Officer at Verisk
- Jason T. Andrew, President, North America at FINEOS
Moderated By:
Terry Buechner, Segment Leader, Insurance and Technology Partners at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Key insights from the partner roundtable included:
- All aspects of the insurance value chain are becoming increasingly data-driven. By accumulating and liberating their data, insurers make it possible for internal teams to innovate in ways they traditionally couldn’t.
- Data is essential for insurers to properly target and attract a digital generation of customers. Begin by answering the questions that will derive the most insights around the behavior of your customers - whether its price, product, feature, location, agent behavior, etc. Knowing more about why existing customers make choices helps product development and, ultimately, sales efforts.
- Developing a long-term growth strategy with regards to cloud-enabled analytics is incredibly valuable, but also takes time. Initially, insurers should focus on specific challenges and getting previously unseen insights into the hands of key stakeholders. Focus small and on deriving early value - build up from here.
- As data and decision making becomes even more important, insurers will start to fundamentally reimagine their core systems’ architecture. This includes the use of API-based platforms, microservices, and low or no-code platforms.
- Data and analytics is not just about the ability to understand customers, but gaining the capability to influence them in a way that benefits both the customer and the insurer.
- Credibility of data is very important because carriers place a lot of trust in the insights derived from that data. Improvements in areas like Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes are helping make gains in this space by productionizing data cycles.
Key quotes from the partner round table included:
- “As data companies become more comfortable working with the traditional legacy systems, these analytics companies can find and ingest data that makes those complex systems easier to use than before. This gives insurers the ability to deeply understand customer behavior, what products they want and when, how better to do things like cross sell and upsell, improve retention and lapsation risk, better manage capital, etc.” - Geoff Keast
- “As more legacy systems are replaced, we can take the trillions of pieces of data every year that are generated in the industry, and instead of having them sequestered, we’ll begin to get more and more connectivity. This is where things begin to get a lot more exciting and where we’ll start to see a lot of innovation take place.” - Jason T. Andrew
- “The cloud has been the rally point for many in our industry to undertake a digital transformation. It has made many of us rethink how we approach our business models, how they can exist in a better form, etc. We are increasingly looking at the cloud as the platform or ecosystem where different players in the industry can get together and collaborate.” - Vikas Vats
Tips for turning data objectives into actions:
- Start with something manageable, like in-force monitoring on a very broad level, e.g. entire portfolio of products. By monitoring key metrics, it helps build the capability to combine all the necessary data and helps the team focus on metrics that matter.
- Assess what decisions your team regularly makes or want to be able to make, that can be improved with better data in order to generate use cases.
- Build, test and learn capabilities by making data-driven decisions and evaluating results in a systematic way.
- Ensure there is an executive sponsor who understands the importance of data and the value this can bring to the business.
