Data Visualisation: The Key to Understanding Insurance Data

Insurance buyers collect a wealth of data, but with opportunities come challenges. In this thriving data-rich universe, insurance management teams must manage vast amounts of data to transfer risk and monitor their assets efficiently.

Every year, insurance teams process over 100,000 document entries, according to recent figures, instead of focusing on steps to efficiently navigate the particularities of recession, climate change, and geopolitical upheaval. Making sense of large volumes of data is essential in today’s “permanent crisis” environment. And thankfully, here’s one tool that can help to convey and understand huge sets of data quickly. Enter data visualisation.

The human brain processes image 60,000 times faster than text. Visualisation works from a human perspective because we respond to and process visual data better than any other type of data.

Source: International Forum of Visual Practitioners

Data visualisation has enabled insurance professionals to unlock powerful yet easily digestible and timely insights by presenting data in a visual format that makes it easier to access, understand, and get actionable insights. It involves taking complex data sets and turning them into graphs, charts, tables, or other visuals that show patterns, trends, and relationships between different pieces of information.

By visualising data, we can:

• Interact with asset and risk data intuitively and analyse it more closely
• Identify and respond quickly to emerging threats and trends
• Recognise strongly correlated parameters among graphically represented patterns
• Make better decisions faster by accessing an easy-to-grasp overview of the data
• Using interactive dashboards, view one or more metrics over time, compare multiple years, isolate specific factors, or break down key performance indicators at the departmental level
• Make accurate predictions about future outcomes

Visualisation is crucial for understanding data because it helps people see and interact with it more intuitively. It doesn’t matter how complex or straightforward your visualisation is. Everyone can understand it, no matter how much experience they have.

For insurance buyers, data visualisation can be a powerful tool in understanding their policies, coverage and premiums. With the right visuals, insurance buyers can more readily comprehend their insurance coverage complexities and identify potential gaps or coverages. 

Plus, data visualisation allows insurance teams to spot trends over time, helping to make informed decisions about their policies when the renewal season approaches. Let’s take a look at more detail on how data visualisation can be used in insurance. 

Let’s look at the main benefits of data visualisation for the insurance industry.

Ease of Conveying Information

One of the most relevant benefits of data visualisation is facilitating the flow of information. With data visualisation, insurance buyers can explore data that is otherwise just a collection of tables, numbers, and words. It optimises the viewer’s experience and makes it more compelling.

In addition, visualisations are incredibly flexible. From marine to real estate, they can be used to present information about almost every aspect of risk and asset management.

In addition, images are more easily understood regardless of language, reducing the barrier to communicating with people from other cultures and different languages.

Visual Risk Management

Through risk visualisation, you can process and interpret critical data more efficiently and naturally by using tools that enable graphical representations. Your organisation’s risk profile can be easily understood this way, as can suggestions for improving it.

For example, a risk manager may use visual analytics to identify assets with the highest gross premiums and then drill down into a particular asset: 

With these insights, insurance professionals can better decide where and how to allocate resources for maximum efficiency. This can help them reduce costs and time waste while maximising profits in the long run.

By analysing different types of risks with visual tools such as scatter plots or tree maps, insurance buyers can better understand their potential risks and formulate strategies to address them more effectively. 

Increased Transparency 

Finally, data visualisation also facilitates greater transparency between insurers and buyers. Insurance buyers want information that is easy to understand so they can make informed decisions about their policies. 

Data visualisation also serves as a data literacy tool. In other words, it allows you to read and analyse data, including big data. Because patterns and relationships stand out to the eye, you can easily recognise and compare them.

Using this resource, you can also see hidden structures. As you zoom in and move through the visuals, you can see the bigger picture and choose which details to focus on. For example, in the Analytics module of Insurwave, you can choose to see vessels of specific ownership status:

Using visuals such as bar charts and cohorts, insurance buyers can share detailed information quickly without overwhelming insurance buyers with too much text or endless spreadsheets—which helps build trust and increases efficiency at the same time. 

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Instead of simply presenting static charts and graphs, interactive visualisations allow users to dive deeper into the data. Users can then explore various scenarios, comparing plans side-by-side or seeing how changes in one area can affect other areas of their insurance policy or assets.

For example, with the help of technology-powered tools such as Insurwave’s interactive Risk Map, insurance buyers can easily visualise their assets to spot patterns or trends they wouldn’t have noticed, allowing them to make more informed decisions faster than ever.

Interactive visuals can be an invaluable tool for understanding customer behaviour patterns and tracking market share at a local level. In the example above, marine insurance buyers are increasingly leveraging interactive maps such as Risk Map in Insurwave to visualise the locations of insured assets. This makes it easier for the risk management teams to track current geopolitical events or identify areas where new policies may impact them most. 

Additionally, interactive maps can help risk management teams more accurately assess risk by providing detailed information about geopolitical events, climate conditions, and other factors affecting policy rates.  

Real-Time Dashboards 

Real-time dashboards are becoming increasingly popular among risk management professionals who need access to up-to-date information at any moment. 

Real-time dashboards provide a snapshot of key metrics and performance indicators in an easy-to-understand format, helping insurance teams spot potential issues before they become significant problems. 

This allows insurance professionals to take proactive action before it’s too late, resulting in better customer experience and increased efficiency across the organisation.