The critical role of data and data analytics in crafting new insurance solutions has come into sharp focus in recent years, and no corner of the industry can afford to fall behind the curve of fully utilising the insights at its disposal.
Discussing the value of data in the context of the premium financing sector, Sean Kemple, MD of Close Brothers Premium Finance noted that the flight of consumers to online shopping has created more information about the activity and behaviours of businesses and consumers.
Having the ability to capture that information and turn it into insight will help brokers make more meaningful decisions about their businesses, he said. That could be regarding which particular areas they are looking to do business, or how they are positioning their products based on the trends they’re seeing, or around new areas that they should be exploring as they look to expand their businesses.
“So we've developed a number of tools under our banner of Foresight,” he said. “The first one is our cancellation model, and the cancellation model will allow brokers to understand the propensity for certain types of consumers or demographics to cancel. That's incredibly important for brokers to understand.
“For us to be able to position the propensity and use our propensity models to say to a broker that a certain segment will have a higher possibility of cancellation, a broker can then think about ‘do we target that, do we position it? Or more importantly, how do we price for that? Because we know that there’s a likelihood of that happening.’”
Close Brothers Premium Finance’s Focus 360 is a new tool for commercial lines and Kemple highlighted that it allows the user to see the wider trends that are happening across the marketplace. This enables brokers to benchmark against their peers, he said, in an anonymised way that enables them to see what’s working for other businesses and share best practices. In addition, brokers can see which lines of business are poised for growth and what demand there is for new products and services.
“We may see other areas, as the economy changes that will start to shift like property or other services,” he said. “So that allows a broker to make a decision on where they position themselves. It also allows them to see [if] there are more areas that they could grow into. Are there areas that they can expand into, are there other areas that are a little bit more risky for them, and they may want to retract from that? It allows our brokers to see that in a nutshell.”
