Below is the 3rd of 11 Novarica Research Council Impact Award nominee case studies that INN is presenting, in no particular order. The awards, which will be presented at the research and advisory firm’s August 21st event in New York, honor best practices in insurance industry IT initiatives and strategy.
RLI Insurance Company, a midsize specialty insurer, created the ability to analyze consolidated books of business using geophysical location parameters, policy type, limits and other policy attributes and delivered geocoding capabilities for consolidated analysis and underwriting.
The team structured property data in a new database and prioritized a few books of property business as the initial deliverable. The project took six months from concept to completion, with two IT employees performing the work, occasionally supported by product vendors. For address cleansing and geo-tagging, the team used CoreLogic, and for the presentation layer, they used SpatialKey, a cloud-based visualization and analytics tool.
The project also included the ability to analyze risk separation using geophysical location parameters and other policy attributes when evaluating individual risks within the underwriting process. Actuaries and underwriters helped create the requirements and offered feedback. The project was delivered using agile development, and the core project team met regularly during the conception and development processes.
Because RLI is a multi-product company, and because the data is contained in numerous systems with no master property database, determining the number of locations that to geocoded was a significant challenge.
The success of the project prompted RLI to develop a custom underwriting application with SpatialKey that can be embedded in the underwriter’s risk selection and analysis process. It also reinforced the company’s agile development and cloud strategies and bolstered the team’s confidence in using cloud-based providers and an agile/iterative approach to delivery.
Novarica’s Take: “This project is a great example of the last mile in analytics providing rich, contact-sensitive information to underwriters when they need it,” said Karlyn Carnahan, principal at Novarica.
