Insurance Business Intelligence and Analytics Consultancy

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Welcome to InEdge a consultancy in Business Intelligence and Analytics for the insurance industry. We create and implement enterprise-level customized BI solutions specifically aligned with our clients’ corporate strategies.

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About InEdge

InEdge is the leader in Insurance Business Intelligence and Analytics solutions. As experienced consultants in Insurance BI we go beyond traditional insurance data solutions such as data integration, warehousing and management, providing full-spectrum BI consulting and implementation for insurers. Our complete solutions are always tailored to your specific needs.

Insurance Business Intelligence

Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence and Analytics

A common Objective: Driving and Delivering Superior Business Performance

Business Intelligence (BI) is the process of taking operational data and putting it to use making informed business decisions. A Business Intelligence solution takes the mass of information kept in a company’s operational data sources, integrates it, analyzes it, and presents timely findings in the form of reports and dashboards. The primary goal of Business Intelligence is to provide accurate, complete, and integrated information to an organization to achieve superior performance.

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Business Intelligence provides the visibility necessary to pinpoint inefficiencies, as well as the capability to transform these into competitive advantages. It also provides an organization with the ability to identify new opportunities and the agility to respond to changing business realities. Finally, Business Intelligence optimizes every aspect of an organization’s operations to deliver maximum value throughout the entire value chain.

At the foundation of Business Intelligence is data warehousing. Data warehousing is a process whereby data from dispersed business units, originating from different sources or operational systems, is integrated for the purpose of analysis and reporting from a single version of the truth.

Data warehousing lets an organization attain and manage trusted data faster across departments. It efficiently integrates the increasing volumes of enterprise data and thereby frees up more time for an organization to drive strategic value. Customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management, and Business Intelligence, for example, are applications that require data from across an organization to be well integrated.

According to Gartner, an information technology research and advisory firm, Analytics is defined as packaged BI capabilities for a particular domain or business problem. We like to say it is the ability to provide a business user with the key metrics and performance indicators relevant to his own business domain. Not to be mistaken with Predictive Analytics which use techniques such as data mining, data visualization and neural networking to find patterns or trends in data. These patterns or trends are then used to forecast or predict future behavior. One needs Data warehousing and BI techniques to deliver the proper Analytics to the business community.

Characteristics of Business Intelligence in Insurance

Business Intelligence can offer insurance-specific warehouse-to-analytics solutions, allowing Property & Casualty and Life insurers to aggregate policy, claim, and customer data to gain a single view of the customer and the enterprise. Business Intelligence allows insurance companies to perform insurance-specific calculations to optimize distribution channels and book of business, identify cost savings across departments, such as claims, actuarial, financial, and corporate, and ultimately maximize profitability.

Insurance Data Warehousing

Insurance companies face an enormous volume and complexity of data, which can be fragmented and dispersed among departments. Claims and policy data can reside in multiple legacy systems. Integrations between multiple data sources can take valuable development time. Business Intelligence aims to aggregate claims and policy data from one or many core systems into an insurance-specific, enterprise-wide data warehouse. Collecting data from multiple sources, transforming it into a common format, and consolidating it into a single source, ultimately creates one view for better decision-making and faster responses to market changes.

Business Intelligence and Analytics can help insurance professionals get useful information in the form of reports, dashboards, and ad-hoc queries and it also supports predictive analysis applications.

Benefits of Insurance Business Intelligence and Analytics

Property & Casualty Insurance Requirements

The Property & Casualty (P&C) Insurance industry relies on successful data flows to make tactical and strategic decisions. Managing high data volumes in the areas of premiums, claims, transactions, brokers, policies, risks, and coverages, is an industry challenge. Billions of dollars in P&C Direct Written Premiums (DWPs) need be analyzed and complex reports produced using Business Intelligence and Analytics solutions. Data sharing is essential for brokers in selecting better risks, driving performance, and retaining high renewal rates. Quality information therefore becomes the fuel that drives the industry.

Life Insurance Requirements

The Individual Life and Investment market has changed significantly these past few years. Companies have de-mutualized or consolidated and other players in the financial services industry have chipped away at the traditional customer base that Insurance companies have served for so long. The competition is also developing and implementing programs to manage customer and partner relationships more effectively. This creates a business conjecture in which access to information is the key to success. Easy and timely access to information therefore becomes critical to a diversified Insurance company. It is also clear that Business Intelligence and Analytics enable ease of access to corporate data. Business Intelligence can help an Insurance company’s financial and actuarial groups create a single data and information source to support the Source of Earnings (SOE) process. The benefits are significant and immediate, from the one-stop-reporting capacity, to flawless, security-enabled, tactical, and analytical reporting.

Benefits of Business Intelligence and Analytics

Business Intelligence allows for visualization of information, irrespective of its source origins, in a multitude of formats. An organization can summarize or analyze information that supports best practices from the Insurance industry. From marketing to underwriting, claims to reinsurance, actuarial analysis to accounting, Business Intelligence and Analytics bring better business decision-making to every insurance business domain. By unlocking the power of Business Intelligence or Analytics, organizations are able to:

Improve revenue and profits by acquiring and retaining high value customers.
Reduce costs through more effective and responsive management.
Automate and improve compliance with regulatory reporting requirements.
Improve customer loyalty through improved quality and superior service.
Cultivate and maintain a book of business by analyzing and understanding real-time data in the form of customer habits, attributes, and trends ensuring marketing strategies target and retain more profitable customers. Marketing and sales strategies adopted today help determine long-term profitability.
Manage and mitigate business risks, for example, natural disasters can form significant business risks to insured assets. Analysis of operational data can help identify geographic risks and allow for book of business diversification accordingly.
Assess influences on profitability by analyzing claims information to determine the implications of daily decisions and adjust underwriting choices to positively influence profitability.
Improve business strategy and operational transparency by standardizing data reporting and analysis to create a single version of the truth across an organization allowing for improved business decision-making capabilities.
Reduce reporting process cycle time using Business Intelligence to deliver reports and analysis to decision-makers more quickly, enabling faster and more informed decision-making.
Handle exceptions faster and better using Business Intelligence to proactively pinpoint quality control issues providing more time for correction and mitigation.

Insurance functions that can benefit from Business Intelligence or Analytics

Claims

Business Intelligence reporting and analysis can empower a claims operations team in:

Providing increased responsiveness to policyholders and claimants
Verifying and controlling allocated and unallocated loss expenses
Analyzing claim data by a specific account, line of business or geography, if there is a sudden or unexpected increase or decrease in claim activity
Identifying exposure and the location of potential losses in the event of a disaster
Quantifying financial information, such as claim frequency, severity, paid losses, incurred losses, loss adjustment expenses incurred, outstanding reserves, reserve adequacy, and net paid losses
Analyzing business/commercial risks where significant losses are involved
Analyzing costs associated with a specific industry or line of business to identify unusual patterns in development
Improving cycle time in processing claims and payments

Actuarial

A Business Intelligence solution, along with a standard data model, benefits and improves the following capabilities:

Assessing financial data, performing profitability analysis, and generating revenue forecasts
Reviewing pricing adequacy
Analyzing trends and performance statistics
Assessing patterns of loss and providing actions for mitigation corrective actions or adjustments
Assessing market acceptance and acceptable loss ratios

Underwriting

Benefits for underwriting activities include:

Analyzing profitability indicators
Reporting premium and loss information
Calculating and tracking loss ratios and loss frequency by line, state, policy form, or risk category
Tracking and mitigating overall exposure by risk category
Monitoring policy and/or premium volumes by product or line in specific geographic territories
Monitoring exposure that is being assumed in a region, state, or country
Identifying trends such as sudden changes in the frequency, duration, and outcome of claims or premium volumes