Insurers speed up predictive analytics adoption

According to Property Casualty 360, the insurance industry can turn vast amounts of unstructured data into helpful insights through predictive analytics. The source stated that advanced analytic models can give insurers an edge in high-risk situations and even improve their relationships with customers.

According to the source, the age of using subsets of data may be over. New analytics technologies take entire sets of large data, no matter its format, and intelligently select which figures can help the company most. These models allow for less chance of outliers and a more nuanced picture of the data. Ideally, the result will be better decisions.

Property Casualty 360 quoted a survey by Towers Watson stating that over 70 percent of insurers in the United States have already applied some predictive processing when issuing personal auto policies.

A recent Business Insurance report highlighted a movement under way by insurers to take on claims management systems with support for analytics. Industry consultant Karen Pauli was adamant that companies should not stop there, and should add analytics applications to make those systems work at peak efficiency. She also stated that insurers should devote staff to maintaining big data processes.