The INSURTECH Book

Data Changes Everything

By Visesh Gosrani FIA

Director of Risk and Actuarial, Guidewire, Cyence Risk Analytics

There is a Large Untapped Potential to Collect Relevant Data about Policy-holders and their Homes

A significant and ever-increasing amount of data is being generated by people and their homes. Whether you look at the TV, the washing machine, the fridge, your Google home or Alexa devices, data are everywhere and can be collected to better service home owners. These data have the potential to provide much more accurate details on a policy-holder’s behaviours, but also their wants and needs as well as their risk profile.

This chapter seeks to describe the benefits for both the customer and the insurer of collecting and analysing a wider range of data sets to deliver personalized insights and services. The chapter sets out a few guiding principles and illustrates those principles with examples focused on home insurance. The same scenarios are equally applicable to other types of insurance offerings.

Helping Policy-holders Understand Actions or Characteristics that Put them at an Increased Risk of a Claim

No rational policy-holder desires the interruption caused by a claim. They may not understand how their behaviours or circumstances affect or increase their likelihood of suffering such an event. However, combined together, policy-holders’ specific data and more general environmental data can help an insured manage his or her risk better.

Policy-holders’ specific data ...