Discover how data can support insurers to meet their key goals across the insurance value chain.
To better understand risk and find opportunities, it is essential for insurers to have accurate and up-to-date data across the insurance value chain. Otherwise, decision making can be less effective, and processes can become slow. Zulf Raja, Insurance Industry Lead at Dun & Bradstreet, highlights how the right kind of data can support insurers to meet their key goals.
Why having the ‘right kind of data’ is important for the insurance industry
Insurers often struggle to procure reliable, accurate and regularly updated external data on which to base their goals, strategies and decisions. The data insurers do hold is often kept in siloes – it typically has gaps and duplications. Yet investment in data – and the digital technologies that enable effective storing and sharing of it – is vital to insurers’ operating and business models.
Data can help overcome challenges around customer expectations, staying ahead of competition, need for innovation, being resilient to external disruption and managing risk and compliance obligations. Due to the growing volume and complexity of data, it can be hard to know what is relevant and how to make decisions with it – insurers need a way to ensure accuracy and standardise data across the value chain and within multiple departments.
Changing the way insurers do business
Data can massively impact the way insurers do business:
Driving profitable growth – market segmentation and intelligence are vital in identifying key targets, for lead prioritisation, routing and for marketing strategy decisions.
More accurate risk selection, underwriting and pricing – understanding the holistic risk picture of potential/existing insureds, pre-screening, streamlining quoting and underwriting, supporting investigations, and building models of predictive loss. Bringing in alternative data sources (such as ESG scores, cybersecurity resilience, or marine and cargo shipping information) can help insurers to become more accurate in their underwriting and pricing decisions, making it easier to compete.
Optimising spend and service provider risk management – assessing, monitoring and managing vendor and service provider risk (in the case of technology suppliers this supports DORA regulation requirements). Also consolidating contracts with suppliers to improve spending management.
Meeting regulatory compliance – risk screening i.e. for sanctions, PEPs, cyber risk, AML/ABAC etc., and enhancing corporate sustainability programs with ESG information.
Looking to the future - embracing new technologies and the power of data
Recent shifts in the global economy and geopolitical uncertainties have emphasised the fragility of traditional operating models. Insurers relying on outdated systems are increasingly vulnerable to market disruptions, regulatory changes, and evolving consumer expectations. Also, in today’s competitive landscape, insurers who embrace new technologies and leverage the power of data will not only simply survive but also set a precedent for a new era of more customer centric innovation. The ones that don’t will be left behind due to less precise risk- and underwriting decisions and poor customer centricity. Insurers should consider working with a third party to match and enrich their data, which will power their technology investments and allow them to develop the capabilities to extract meaningful insights from them.
Using accurate, real-time global data across the value chain, enables insurers to make smart decisions and drive performance. They will have a strong data foundation to serve customers, remain compliant with existing and new regulations with lower effort, and better understand the risk, either from an insured or service provider point of view. There has never been a better time to invest in foundational data, ahead of launching big technology upgrades and trialling AI.
How can Dun & Bradstreet help insurers with their data decisions?
Dun & Bradstreet combines global data and local expertise to help clients make smarter decisions and power business performance. We have the world’s leading commercial database, with records on over 580 million entities in 250 markets around the world in our Data Cloud. Our D-U-N-S unique identifier (the D-U-N-S Number) enables the matching and consolidation of data into a single, living source of truth on each business.
In addition to foundational firmographic data, we can provide insights that supports the complete insurance value chain – from market segmentation and intelligence to drive growth, and information to inform risk selection, underwriting and pricing decisions; to key risk indicators to support service provider risk management and compliance processes (including sanctions, cyber risk, AML, trade credit risk, etc).
It has been proven that business firmographic, financial and credit health are predictors of insurance losses, and we have the highest quality data in these areas as well. Clients also purchase hierarchy and linkage information, beneficial ownership data, ESG intelligence, shipping and climate risk insights, cyber risk ratings and more for a full picture of who they are/may soon be doing business with. Clients can access our data and predictive analytics via API, our intelligent web solutions, or batch file. We also partner with key tech players such as Databricks, Snowflake, Salesforce, Google Cloud, Quantexa, Send Technology, and more.
What benefits do Dun & Bradstreet clients see?
One global insurer employs Dun & Bradstreet to support across a number of their different business lines. They started with clear ambitions and objectives for data and analytics and were looking for a partner to help them achieve these. We began a number of years ago, by cleansing, matching their customer records across the business to our D-U-N-S number, and enriching those records with additional data points. This allowed them to maintain up-to-date and timely customer records across departments and gain a deeper view of their client base. We then applied some of our sales and marketing intelligence solutions that allowed the client to identify growth opportunities through market penetration, ‘lookalikes’ businesses and white space analysis.
“Whilst the complexity of data increases, the integrated Dun & Bradstreet Solution across our global applications has allowed our organisation to consolidate our customer data to a single standardised view, giving us a complete view of our customer.” – Generali
“Since this initial project, we have built a successful strategic partnership with this customer, supporting multiple business units with their data goals. Most recently, we have helped their Global Corporate and Commercial (GC&C) team to modernise and automate their client onboarding process, by enabling them to establish beneficial ownership, and automate compliance and sanctions screening on a global scale. This has helped them to reduce the time taken for onboarding, in some cases by days.”
“Our screening solution allows us to have a fully integrated workflow with comprehensive data enrichment, covering everything from sales and underwriting activities to compliance and audit, all without system breaks or email traffic.”
- Generali
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To find out more about how our data and solutions can help insurers make smarter decisions that drive business performance, please click the link below and visit our Insurance Hub