Healthier lives for our four-legged friends

Agria uses SAS^® to provide better care for pets and peace of mind for their owners

People love their pets. So it should come as no surprise that global spending on cats, dogs and horses is on the rise. Veterinarian bills make up a large portion of the spending, and people are increasingly insuring their pets to protect against unexpected health problems. According to Research Nester, the global market for pet insurance was estimated at US$2.6 billion and is forecast to reach $5.7 billion by 2024.

Agria is a Swedish insurance company that provides health, life and liability insurance for pets and farm animals. The insurer is present in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, France and Great Britain, and is a subsidiary of the Swedish mutual insurance company Länsforsäkringar.

Agria uses SAS Studio and SAS Visual Analytics to calculate pricing and risk factors for its insurance products, as well as for marketing and communications.

To further champion the health of animals, the company also uses its vast amounts of data to provide statistics on the health of different animal breeds to scientists, veterinarians and breed associations.

“Our mission is to promote best of care for the animals and peace of mind for their owners,” says Peter Nord Andersson, Head of Pricing and Analytics at Agria. “We believe that through better animal welfare, we get healthier pets. We provide our data to breeders, researchers and veterinarians to help understand illnesses and breeding-related health issues. We also donate part of our income to further research in animal welfare.”

Sophisticated data analysis

Data analysis is a core competency of the insurance industry, and animal insurance is no exception. Many factors weigh into the calculations of prices, risk and market development.

“With Agria operating in six markets, our data analysis is a very sophisticated operation,” Andersson says. “We have hundreds of gigabytes of data and a lot of parameters for cross-analysis. We needed a sophisticated analytics platform and the ability to show different perspectives on the data. With SAS Visual Analytics, we’ve gained a lot more granularity in our information and have increased our usage of analytics across the organization.”

Today, more than 50 Agria employees use SAS Visual Analytics to perform their daily tasks. Instead of relying on aggregated data sets and the help of consultants to gain insight, people from sales, product development and market surveillance can access a wealth of reports to see both high-level trends and detailed information – down to a specific dog and its product suite.

To compound this capability, Andersson has invested in Agria’s analytics journey by completing a SAS data science training program. He’s now better equipped to drive business value through the use of data and analytics.

Data for dog breeders

Agria dedicates significant resources to promoting animal health. By analyzing claims data, Agria can spot trends in health issues and feed this information to professional breeders. Working in SAS Visual Analytics has brought speed and efficiency to these efforts.

“We produce detailed breed profile reports on the health of animals,” Andersson says. “For each dog breed, we have two reports. It used to take up to two months to compile this information – now these reports are done automatically with SAS. And if we want the report to be on a different breed, we just change the breed in the report, and the data changes automatically.”

Looking to the future, Agria plans to deploy the advanced analytics capabilities of SAS^® Viya^® to empower business users to predict outcomes of different scenarios.

“We are continuously transforming our business, and the best way is to involve the users,” Andersson says. “It’s only when analytics is used widely, and the knowledge is spread out, that we can reap the real benefits.”