First Central Group CIO John Davison is augmenting the standard underwriting process with data analytics tools.
“The way the business works is you have an underwriting assessment of a risk and you perform a series of calculations,” Davison told CIO UK. “When they’re different, we have a team of people who do statistical modelling. We’re using analytics and AI for that process.”
“We continue to perform the standard, actuarial calculations that are done and the modelling that’s done, and we then augment that with data enrichment machine learning to help us pick the right models.”
FCG produces its own bespoke technology products that it can continually develop, such as Focus, a retail insurance platform that can capture and analyse data from quotes, bookings and claims in real time.
Davison gains widespread faith in data science by demonstrating its value, whether it’s underwriting profits or making contact centres more efficient.
“That value can be more than just financial value,” he says. “It can help the employees’ working life and it can make our customers happier so our NPS scores [Net Promoter Scores] can go up. All of these things are barometers and fundamentally it’s about being able to derive value from the information and demonstrate that that value exists.”