Identification of positions and management of risk is critical to the world’s insurers. 

A number of these insurers have turned to Dataspace for help with the design and development of world class business intelligence applications.  Our efforts have ranged from helping develop claims analysis systems to the analysis and design of business intelligence applications targeted at evaluating independent insurance agents.

Some of our recent insurance efforts have included:

Persistence Analysis
Standard practice in the life insurance business is to pay independent agents large commissions upon sale of new policies.  Commission schedules rapidly decline in following years.  This creates an incentive for independent agents to move customers to different providers once the commissions are paid.  The result, of course, is that the insurer has paid commissions but does not receive the full benefit of the expected premium stream or related investment revenues.

Dataspace worked with one of the US’ largest life insurers to attack this issue.  The system developed by Dataspace consultants reviews the average persistence of customers along a number of dimensions, including agent.  Our client uses this system to design policies and manage its relationships with its agents.

Placement Optimization
While underwriting is a very costly process to the insurer, it typically costs the selling agent little or nothing.  Agents, therefore, have incentives to submit all possible customers to underwriting, even if those prospects don’t appear to be able to pass through the underwriting process.  The result can be a large number of policies for which the insurer pays underwriting investigation costs but which, in the end, don’t justify this expense.

Working with once of the US’ largest life insurers, Dataspace creating a business intelligence application to analyze this effort.  The system allows our client to determine which independent agents have a history of selling insurance to poor prospects.  The result is that our client can now evaluate its agents on the dimension of placement effectiveness, providing greater insights into what really defines a good agent.

CRM Integration – Salesforce.com
Being built upon data, insurers frequently have data duplicated in multiple places.  Chaos can ensue if these data stores are not synchronized.  Dataspace consultants helped a life insurance client overcome this problem by developing technologies to link the firm’s home grown operational data store (ODS) with Salesforce.com, its customer relationship management (CRM) system.  Now, updates to agent data in the ODS are automatically synchronized with the CRM system, eliminating confusion and time wasted in correlating data across applications.

Data Integration and Master Data Management Design and Implementation

Data Warehouse Architecture Review and Redesign
Dataspace’s client, a property and casualty insurer, was hampered by its dependence on an antiquated, poorly designed data warehouse and reporting architecture.  Among the problems were: delays in providing month end results, reports containing incorrect data and excessive effort required to run and maintain the system.  To address this situation Dataspace was engaged to quickly assess the system and identify areas for potential improvement.  Completing this assessment in two weeks, the project team created a comprehensive analysis of the system’s architecture and a plan for addressing each shortcoming identified.  Being well received, the client is working with Dataspace to implement the recommendations in this report.