Ian Summers: Insurance firms should ‘do the simple stuff first’ with data journeys

When it comes to leveraging underwriting data, those insurers able to eke out advantages will be the companies that continue to compete effectively in the long term. 

And although every Tom, Dick and Harry is now looking to garner these advantages, the reality is that creating effective tools in this area is incredibly difficult. 

AdvantageGo is an insurtech with over 30 year’s experience in developing and dealing with these tools, however, and Ian Summers, the firm’s global business leader, tells Insurance Times that it is easy to get things wrong when developing data-focused underwriting tools. 

He says: ”People that try to change the world, who think it’s going to be perfect straight away, tend to get caught up in quite long projects – and long projects in technology have very bad track records. 

“My advice to anyone is to do the simple stuff first, get that working reasonably well and then start to understand how you can and can’t use that data. After that you can get to the more complex things.

“We’ve had really big UK commercial customers who tried to do it all in one go and it has been quite painful because they’ve been learning at the same time.”

Underwriting workbench 

AdvantageGo has been working with the (re)insurance industry for over 30 years to support data driven projects and digitalise underwriting, so Summers is well placed to comment on what works – and what doesn’t – with these initiatives.

And although he notes that “everyone’s got a slightly different view of what they want out of technology”, there are some general lessons that can be taken. 

He explains: ”Some people are obsessed with data ingestion, but then end up with all of this unstructured data and don’t know what to do with it, which is the first thing. 

“The second this is that ingesting a slip or a contract is not actually going to help you with your underwriting insights. The trick is filtering out thousands of risks that come through the front door when you only want to write three of them anyway – you need to be able to triage.” 

AdvantageGo’s underwriting workbench tool is designed primarily to achieve this goal, allowing underwriters to “press a button” from within the Outlook email client and triage hundreds of broker messages against a pre-defined set of underwriting parameters – meaning that the underwriter can then theoretically focus their time on examining offers that fit the bill.

Summers says: “It will tell you where you are against a criteria and will try to only show you things you really want to look at, having already completed all the customer background checks and regulatory stuff automatically.”

Ecosystem partners

While the triage component of AdavantageGo’s underwriting workbench is one of its most valuable tools, its utility doesn’t end there. 

The way AdvantageGo has designed the proposition allows it to easily plug new functionalities into the software by partnering with other insurtechs as ecosystem partners. 

“The technology bit is actually quite easy – but adoption can be a pigging nightmare”

For example, the firm partners with insurtech company Zywave to, among other things, assess incoming risks against historically similar ones and produce an informed prediction of the likelihood that the risk will end in a claim.

AdvantageGo has partnered with a large selection of different insurtechs across the market to integrate their functionalities into the workbench, with a focus on allowing each customer to select which functions work best for their specific contexts. 

Summers explains: ”As an underwriter, you need to be able to cope with multiple different incoming channels and do that from your desktop – so we provide a dashboard that has all of those third party insights in one place. 

“That’s the compelling part about the partner ecosystem for customers – they can choose which third parties they want to use and, because we’ve preconfigured them into the tool, they’re ready to go.

“No company can keep up with every new insurtech that comes out and, because around half of them will fail, if you’ve wedded in directly and connected them to all your systems, then you will take take the pain of a potential failure too. So we can take that pain too.”

Customers also benefit from having one point of call for when things go wrong, with AdvantageGo managing the dashboard and able to troubleshoot any problems. This also benefits the insurtechs themselves as they are given a speed boost where integration and adoption is concerned.

And, as Summers says, “the technology bit is actually quite easy – but adoption can be a pigging nightmare”.

Managing numerous technology partners can be incredibly time consuming for insurance industry firms, with underwriters better suited to actually performing underwriting taks than troubleshooting glitches. 

This partnership models allows AdvantageGo to manage this for its clients, says Summers, with the added bonus of its tool being able to simply “sit on top of all your old legacy technology”. 

He says: “We spent three years building a solid framework and learned the lessons to make that framework such that you can now roll a new business [into the ecosystem] in 12 weeks. 

“Technology is easy, it’s insurance that’s difficult. When you break it down, the skill and real depth is in those independent third party partners – we’ve just found them and connected them to our workflow engine.”