Analytics for Insurance

Preface

I never intended to work in insurance, technology or analytics, but rather those three things found me. Like so many others, my journey to insurance and analytics started elsewhere and for me it was on the engineering draughtsman's table. There I used mathematics to design new structures but my heart was not so much in the creation of new structures, but rather in the understanding of why structures fail – and then who might be responsible for such failure.

In the failure of structures, all roads lead to the insurance industry. Structures fail because of defective design, workmanship or materials, and there is insurance cover for all of these. With the passage of time I was to learn that in some cases it might be possible to anticipate the cause of failure even before a physical investigation by using data. It seemed an important thing to step away from my engineering background and qualifications to learn a new trade, that of insurance, and in time I became qualified in that industry. Along the way I also discovered the professions of marketing and supply chain management and added these as strings to my bow.

Each time I stepped outside one profession to learn another, it felt like stepping off the top diving board at the diving pool. Looking down, I could see the water but had no real sense of how deep or even how warm it was. I discovered the main barriers between professions were not just of capability but of language, with each profession having its own terminology. ...