Evolving Insurance with Data and Analytics

Insurance companies around the world are striving ahead with innovative offerings that are fundamentally changing the insurance landscape. Insurance companies are creating personalized offerings and products that are tailored to the specific needs of their customers. For example, they are implementing usage-based insurance (UBI) based on driving habits, miles driven and driving history and discounts on health insurance based on health trackers, etc.).  This all better addresses the customers’ expectations.  A recent Accenture Global Financial Services Consumer Study identified that 64% of consumers want premiums that are tied to behavior (such as driving safety).    

Data as a Launchpad

This evolution of insurance industry offerings is largely a result of the underlying data available to insurers.  Insurance companies have historically maintained an abundance of data about their customers – it forms the basis of actuarial tables for life insurance, identifies the most at risk drivers and determines the cost of property insurance.  Fast forward and that data now provides the foundation, the launchpad, that enables new innovations and is propelling the insurance industry forward.

Insurers are now going beyond the use of just historical or structured data to add new and emerging sources of information, including streaming real-time data from connected devices and tapping into unstructured data such as video and images to power compelling use cases. As technology has advanced and compute power has increased, insurers are tapping new data sources such as location, weather, driving and health statistics, video streams and social media streams to form an enhanced view of events and associated risks.  The combination of real-time and transaction data combined with historical data enables predictive modeling to better anticipate outcomes. 

Using more enhanced data and analytics, insurance companies can better support the needs of their customers. It assists life, health and P&C insurance companies to run the business more efficiently including regulatory reporting and underwriting improvements.

An Enterprise Data Cloud for Insurance

With the industry evolving at an unprecedented pace and the volume and variety of data increasing exponentially, it is crucial to have an enterprise data approach that enables the agility to address new initiatives.  IoT and machine learning are becoming more and more prevalent.  Images and alternative data such as social media and climate conditions are offering valuable insight that needs to be consumed. Flexibility to manage new data sources and data across IT environments is critical. 

An enterprise data cloud offers the ability to collect, process, store, analyze, model any type of data (structured, unstructured, or semi-structured data), regardless of where it lands — at the edge, on- premise, in the data center, or in any public, private, or hybrid clouds. An enterprise data cloud enables the insight to be realized from the data to serve customers better and operate with greater efficiency. 

Cloudera Data Platform

Cloudera Data Platform is the industry’s first enterprise data cloud, offering a full range of analytic capabilities from the Edge to AI. At Cloudera, we’re enabling an enterprise data and analytics strategy to help leading insurance customers collect this data from across the enterprise and gain insights to better run their business.  

Watch this video where Monique Hesseling, Cloudera’s Managing Director for Insurance, talks about what is possible with data and what an exciting time it is to be in Insurance.

For more information about Cloudera in Insurance and a sampling of customer case studies, visit our website

Sandra Horn
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