Winner or loser?

by David Hartley, SAS

In insurance, intelligence is premium. It's what separates the winners from the losers.

Insurance companies around the globe have built their successful businesses on the back of "good intelligence." For example, the core insurance practice of setting a fair premium for a specific known risk means that the ability to organize, manipulate and then learn from available data is central to the on-going success of that business.

While there are some business regulations, such as Solvency II and other relevant legislation, heading toward insurers, many of the business pressures that insurers face today are not really new. For example, the need to continue to price correctly, manage potential lapsers, reduce fraudulent claims and provide better support for insurance agency networks remain as important for companies as ever. What's different today is the speed with which such issues occur and the correlated need to be able to respond swiftly to turn them into positive opportunities that can impact the operating profit.

One of SAS' core beliefs is that the only true differentiator in business today is gaining the ability to manage and correctly interpret the data available within your company – and turning it into real intelligence. In late 2002, SAS launched its first suite of Insurance Intelligence Solutionsand insurance companies across the world are now reaping the business benefits that these solutions deliver. These Insurance Intelligence Solutions combine award-winning SAS technologywith encapsulated business issue knowledge and the experience of SAS specialists working in 850-plus insurance companies around the globe.

These solutions can help you to minimize your "time to intelligence" for specific business issues and can provide a strong starting point for tackling them operationally. Because SAS knows that each insurance market is unique, and that even within local insurance markets different insurers have different engagement models, our solutions can be fully customized to meet 100 percent of specific insurers' needs.

For example, one of the key trends in insurance is to use available data to look forward, rather than simply to just report on what has happened in the past. If an insurer would like to predict which of its current auto insurance customers will make a claim in the next 12 months, the SAS Claims Prediction for Insurance solution provides "starter" analytical models to do exactly this – including the ability to predict the likely claims incidence and claims frequency which can be reapplied back to each policyholder or vehicle.

Similarly, the need to effectively manage the sales agency network of many insurance companies remains at the top of most insurance companies' agendas. The SAS agency management for insurance solution allows insurance companies to ensure that up-to-date information on their individual agents is readily available to internal key decision makers. It also provides an early warning system when specific agents are not measuring up to agreed upon key performance indicators.

Each of the products in our suite is built on the SAS insurance intelligence architecture that prevents the costly proliferation of data silos. This means that you can benefit from fully integrated business intelligence architecture across the enterprise that supports core concepts like client and agency centricity, allowing a single view not only of the customer, but of an agent as well.

The insurance intelligence architecture is intended to help you more easily retrieve the intelligence you need from your existing data warehouse. And it is the effective use of intelligence that will determine which insurance companies are winners and which are losers in these changing times – which side does your company want to be on?

Bio: David Hartley is responsible for the direction and development of a series of industry-specific intelligence solutions for insurance and banking within SAS International.