The survey comes as somewhat a surprise. Are insurers so far behind?
The recent european IOT in Insurance conference run by FC-BI also showed that insurers (perhaps these were the progressive thinking insurers) were embracing the need for change. the conference highlighted a number of key challenges, those relevant to this discussion are:
understanding the value of IOT devices as both threats and opportunities for new insurance products; inparticular, the relevance, quality and usgae of new data;
The need to get data and technology "mess" sorted out inside the insurer;
putting the disciplines in place to use data and technology to create the digital insurer
Several lively debates and a wealth of real pragmatic solution told me you had to be adopting it, or you were going to be the next "blockbuster".
This also confirmed my experience over the last 15 years that larger global insurance companies are using big data analytics, doing it well, and have defined well though out analytics centre of excellence in place. Some have home developed detailed analytic data models to streamline and simplify the time from data sensing to gaining insights.
I have also heard the upsurge in requests about SAS's (The business analytics company) insurance data model, allowing insurers to accelerate their consolidation and create a insurance data platform to drive their market (https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/en_us/doc/productbrief/sas-insurance-analytics-architecture-104891.pdf).
For the technology expert in most insurers they know what has to be done, if anything they perhaps lack the manner to release funding from the business , and the credibility to successfully lead such a transformation.
Opportunities expand every day with the proliferation of new sources, including sensors, Web chat logs and videos, as well as the 195,000 datasets that US government agencies have made publicly available. Yet most insurers have barely scratched the surface. Roughly one in three life insurers and one in five P&C insurers do not apply Big Data advanced analytics for any function, according to Bain’s benchmarking survey. On average, insurers apply Big Data to approximately two functions (see Figure 1), and many companies do not have a solid plan to wring value out of the data. Discussions tend to hover on data management issues and technology investment decisions, rather than focusing on the more important question of exactly how to derive wisdom from data in order to make better decisions.
