A formula for success: Why Excel probably isn't the best management solution
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Summary
- Microsoft Excel has been the preferred data management tool for businesses everywhere for decades – and insurance is no exception.
- However, with the growing size and complexity of datasets, manual processes like keying data into Excel spreadsheets and other text or code-driven platforms are no longer fit for purpose.
- Some insurers have and continue to use it as the basis of intricate pricing systems. However, the more complicated your underwriting requirements are, the more likely the Excel-based system will impact your organisation’s agility and profitability. As risks and portfolios become more complex, insurers need robust, integrated tools that evolve at the speed of our market.
- Through technology, data visualisation techniques can be elevated to unlock detailed information about future geopolitical events, and other factors affecting policy rates, allowing insurance professionals to better understand their exposures, identify patterns and the key information that may affect pricing.
- The case for modern data management solutions is a clear one. Significant time savings, live tracking of exposure assets and vastly reduced administrative responsibilities ensure that your time can be spent on the tasks that matter most and enable you to make better informed decisions.
Microsoft Excel has been the preferred data management tool for businesses everywhere for decades – and insurance is no exception. While there have been advances in technology that enable businesses to compile and present their data in dashboards with much less effort than it would take to create Excel pivot tables, many insurance organisations still rely on manual processes.
However, with the growing size and complexity of datasets, manual processes like keying data into Excel spreadsheets and other text or code-driven platforms are no longer fit for purpose. For data to be treated as a strategic asset, it cannot continue to be left in an unstructured state if insurers want to extract the maximum amount of opportunities and value from it.
Thankfully, there are many solutions and organisations that exist to change this situation and help insurance companies use data to forecast business direction, make decisions and generate insights into process optimisation, maintain comprehensive insights of their business, reduce risk and more. Read on to learn more about the technology available to help you.
Better data, better management
Excel’s flexibility and ease of use have helped make the spreadsheet a long-time favourite for insurance and reinsurance pricing. Some insurers have and continue to use it as the basis of intricate pricing systems. However, the more complicated your underwriting requirements are, the more likely the Excel-based system will impact your organisation’s agility and profitability. As risks and portfolios become more complex, insurers need robust, integrated tools that evolve at the speed of our market.
For example, the bar for data analytics has been raised exponentially beyond manual spreadsheet updates by the advances in technology, enabling companies to make more informed decisions, improve risk assessment and streamline operations. With platforms like Insurwave offering automatic alerts, stakeholders across the insurance value chain no longer have to request updates manually via email and can instead become empowered with the ability to focus on the key risk events and take action to mitigate them at a far more rapid pace.
Similarly when it comes to agile decision-making, being able to visualise your risk data in a clear and actionable way is paramount. Many insurers currently rely on manual updates via email and spreadsheets to even attempt to understand or visualise where their exposures are and their relation to what’s currently happening geopolitically. Through technology, data visualisation techniques can be elevated to unlock detailed information about future geopolitical events, and other factors affecting policy rates, allowing insurance professionals to better understand their exposures, identify patterns and the key information that may affect pricing.
Introducing the data management platform
As has been illustrated in previous examples, there are a multitude of ways technology can improve your data management process. However, what makes Insurwave the number one choice of many insurance professionals is its ability to connect the insurance market to the detailed data points it needs, presented in a clear and digestible format.
Collecting different asset schedule formats and files from within the business, Insurwave maps the data into one inventory. This is further enriched with geolocation data, providing insights for both vessel voyages, cargo shipments and aircraft flight routes. Similarly, Insurwave allows you to manage policies against facilities e.g. binders, consortiums, line-slips and lets you effectively manage the reporting of any new risk, premium or claims bordereaux according to the Lloyds standard.
Analysis aside, we also believe that in the insurance industry, machine learning can be used to improve underwriting accuracy, fraud detection and risk assessment. To that end, Insurwave has also developed its own AI solution to make the promise of the technology real for insurers, harnessing the knowledge of thousands of historical submissions provided by several London market syndicates and insurers to meet the data quality needs of the insurance industry. With the new tool, insurers can upload raw data from multiple formats, including Excel and PDF files, and Insurwave AI will ingest this data and extract not only structured but also enhanced data that can be visualised within the platform or uploaded to catastrophe models and pricing engines, ultimately improving underwriter’s speed and quality of decision making.
Real-world applications
The ongoing geopolitical turmoil in Ukraine continues to impact a multitude of different industries, including global trade through the Black Sea, impacting vessels, but also through prior aircraft confiscation. As a result, insurers rely on platforms like Insurwave to help them get a solid grasp of their exposure. Access to good quality data and an effective form of visualisation for that data is key to both understanding and making better-informed decisions about contracts, premiums and claims.
Through Insurwave’s risk map, insurance teams could take advantage of real-time dashboards and interactive maps to improve their insights and make better-informed risk transfer decisions using data visualisation as a starting point.
From another side of the same conflict, Insurwave helped the UN-backed AsOne Ukrainian grain facility track more than 100 cargo policies and cover and transport 1.5 billion dollars of goods safely. Insurwave technology made it possible to simplify the complex specialty insurance process and transfer immensely challenging risk by connecting all parties to real-time, granular asset information they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. As a result, the whole process, from idea to issuing coverages, took weeks instead of months.
21st-century solutions
Ultimately, the case for modern data management solutions is a clear one. Significant time savings, live tracking of exposure assets and vastly reduced administrative responsibilities ensure that your time can be spent on the tasks that matter most and enable you to make better informed decisions. In a nutshell, 20th-century technology can no longer be relied upon to fix 21st-century problems. The tools are available for those willing to change, so the only question left to ask is: what’s stopping you?