It’s the lifeblood of modern businesses – data. The insurance industry always has had volumes of data and with digital touchpoints this has only been increasing. However, the chronic operational silos and multitude of systems kept some insurers from fully utilizing that data. But today, complementing traditional actuarial approaches, modern businesse sare employing machine learning and analytics to draw upon the uncountable data elements to provide personalized analysis and custom policies. “Data stemming from IoT sensors and other “interactive”, real-time data sources is enabling carriers to offer personalized pricing and usage-based insurance (UBI).Unstructured data such as images and machine learning enable end-to-end, touchless claims processing and fraud prevention,” says Monique Hesseling, MD, Insurance, Cloudera
As the amount and variety of data available cause insurers to evaluate cloud deployment strategies, data privacy becomes another important aspect. Plus, it is particularly challenging for insurers in the US due to the state-by-state regulation in place. This focus on data security also ties in with the efficiencies insurers seek from the cloud. “We are seeing more hybrid data cloud adoption as a result,” informs Monique. Cloudera helps insurers manage the increased quantity and variety of data while managing it securely. Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) supports any type of data. This includes the historical, structured data and the newer sources - unstructured, or real-time data. To further help with operating efficiency, Cloudera offers flexibility in deployment models. “CDP is offered on-premises, or in private, public or a hybrid cloud. We aim to make insurance data accessible to any user - from the data scientist to the line of business users.”
Monique points out, “securing all of this data, especially the sensitive, personal information is a top priority for insurance carriers.” This is managed by Cloudera’s Shared Data Experience (SDX). It addresses the pain of data governance with a security layer that manages access and lineage. Enabling a consistent security layer across a hybrid data cloud provides insurers with the control they want and the ability to choose where data resides.
CDP is an end-to-end data platform. It supports collecting the data from the various sources, enriching, and storing it as well as enabling machine learning and analytics. Since this is offered on a single, enterprise platform, it eliminates the integration effort and costs of running disparate applications to bring new capabilities to market. All this translates into a faster time-to-market while co-existing with legacy systems andsiloed data.
Monique emphasizes that “a frictionless customer experience is an area of critical importance for insurers to better serve their customers. Insurance buyers basically buy trust; so being dependable, approachable, transparent and fair is critical for the insurance industry's business model.”"Personalized offerings are expected today and show the industry is advancing. Insurance rates based on driving habits and discounts based on health habitsenable carriers to create better experiences and avoid any guesswork." It ultimately translates into improved retention and renewal rate for the customers.
In an instrumental engagement, Cloudera helped Manulife - a Canadian insurance firm - store, handle data more meaningfully. The challenge was Manulife's customer data was dispersed, locked up across multiple operating systems in different forms. It included call logs, SMS, emails, service center dialogues, claim forms, website interactions, etc. With help from Cloudera, Manulife's in-house data team built an EDL solution to support digital connection, report automation, and AI & advanced analytics development. The in-house data scientists and data engineers collaborated to create a world-class Customer Contacts Insights Center (CCIC): a web-based analytics platform providing a single source of truth for everyone. CCIC has replaced thousands of stand-alone queries and significantly shortened the time gap between data and action. It has improved customer data insights, ultimately resulting in a better customer experience. Manulife runs on Cloudera now.
The future looks more disruptive for Cloudera. "We will continue to focus on ease of access to the data and hybrid data cloud. Ease of access means enabling any user to access the data - data scientists, analysts, business users, etc. We’ll be offering a SaaS option as part of this strategy." Cloudera also plans to enhance its existing platform with pre-built data services that enable use cases to be deployed even faster.