INSURANCE CEOS: CAN YOU RISK NOT LEVERAGING YOUR DATA ASSETS?

The insurance industry in South Africa is a well-established and extremely competitive sector. New players are entering a relatively small market across multiple product lines from short term, life, funeral and even the now emerging pet insurance markets.

The volumes of data generated in these businesses are enormous, yet even in recent conversations with companies across the sector, when asking about the maturity levels of business intelligence capabilities, most responses indicate maturity levels are low. What is the impact of not having the insights you need at the point in time when it really matters? What is it costing you not having these solutions in place, while your main competitors who have made these investments are discovering new ways to increase their sales, manage their costs better and grow their businesses with fact-based data-driven insights?

The primary reason for the slow shift to becoming data-driven is that the traditional large players evolved with legacy technology while new players have entered the market with the latest and greatest, making them lean, mean and more innovative. For the established companies, the projects required to refresh their technology to stay competitive can seem insurmountable.?

For many insurance companies, the data focus has always been on the actuarial and financial side of the business. This has created silos of high performing data solutions and teams, which has left organisations unprepared for the coming shift that will require the wider business to have access to data-driven decision making.?

With changes from the industry regulators such as IFRS17, as well as evolving market conditions impacted by the COVID pandemic, climate change and uncertain economic factors, data is now the focal point across all business functions, with the industry scrambling to catch up with data skills and infrastructure.?

What we have seen reoccurring, is teams get stuck in what we call ‘Analysis of Paralysis’. This occurs when there are clearly laid out data strategies and frameworks, but little to no execution of the plan. It would also appear that a copy and paste strategy exists, from one company to the next, with the large consulting houses quoted word for word, while the understanding of how to execute these strategies is lacking.?

Our pragmatic approach to delivery and deep technical understanding of the required building blocks places Expeditus in a unique position to map out the business requirements and separate them into individual work packages. This simplifies the execution parameters and speeds up delivery. When working with our insurance clients through the data journey, we have helped to reveal many areas outside of the primary objectives, where unexpected additional value can be mined.?

For instance, in the area of financial reconciliation for Income and Distribution, many customised product lines, components and complex party agreements make this process extremely complex. Large teams in finance spend endless hours reconciling bank statements against source system data and against the distribution result. This is a process that has to be repeated month on month. With the vast amounts of data, this is an almost impossible task to complete, resulting in spot testing and a growing suspense account with reduced cash flow.?

Expeditus understands this challenge and has assisted clients in building automated testing and reconciliation tools. The result is a significant reduction in the time and resource requirements needed for this repetitive process. In addition, enhanced data accuracy allows for early detection of distribution rule issues which can be resolved quickly by the business.?

This is just one example of how we can expedite your journey to becoming data-driven. We can also assist you with the following:?

• Financial Analysis
• Compliance and Audit
• Risk Analysis
• Marketing
• Sales & Distribution
• Policy Holder Analysis
• Fraud Detection
• Claims Management
• Complaints Management

For other technical considerations, we can assist in:

• Cloud Migrations
• Data Strategy Formulations
• Data Literacy

Let’s make you a data-driven organisation.

Expeditus is a leading data consultancy. Visit www.expeditus.co.za for more.