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21 May 2019 Insurance

Mindset ‘biggest barrier’ to data driven risk management for commercial property insurance

Trust and perception remain major barriers to gathering and analysing more data from the property market to help the insurance industry mitigate losses, delegates heard during a panel discussion at the Intelligent Automation event in London today (Tuesday May 21).

Steve Walden, director, global strategy, commercial property at AXA XL, raised the issue and said: “Data is the new gold, so we’re told. Clients are rightly thinking ‘how are you going to take my data and use my data? And where are you going to store my data? Is it going to be used against me?’

“So it’s about trying to understand how we make sure clients continue to trust us, and trust is a core part of what we do at AXA XL and to our relationships with our customers. So it’s about making sure that we don’t abuse that level of trust when thinking about innovation.”

The session, titled ‘Enable Data-Driven Risk Management For Commercial Property Insurance,’ sponsored by GWT Insight, also comprised Laurence King, director London Markets at Charles Taylor InsureTech, and Simon Rawlinson, head of strategy for Commercial Property at Arcadis UK. Iain Wilcox, CEO of GWT Insight moderated the debate.

Arcadis UK’s Rawlinson, highlighted fragmentation as a barrier and said that commercial property and tenures were of particular relevance. “So that’s whether the asset of the data belongs to the landlord or the tenant. And you have different systems in place, then it’s about whether the systems can talk to each other. And some of the discussion earlier today about being able to take unstructured data is really important."

He said another barrier involves scaling across portfolios. “Portfolios are so diverse, its difficult to get consistent data, it’s a bit of a challenge from now on.”

King from Charles Taylor InsureTech identified reticence from commercial property insurers around gathering data digitally at the front end as the biggest barrier.

“Changing people’s mindsets to digitise data or encourage the market to standardise and have a singular locked down version of questionnaires… would help us move slowly to a place where we could all gather digitally and start our journey. Then you’re going to start being able to run analytics across 100 percent of the data coming in, not the 10 percent that can be extracted from forms. This is the biggest mindset change that will happen in the marketplace that will encourage carriers to head down this route [of data driven risk management].”

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