Synthesizing Data
for A New View

By Bill Kenealy

>>da Ta In Tegra TIon

as insurers delve deeper into data-dependent decisioning, they must be careful to regard data collection as a means to an end—and not an end in itself.

one way insurers can derive value from the data already on hand is to hybridize it with disparate data in the hope that the resulting “synthetic” data will produce new insights.

While many of the techno-
logical barriers to synthetic data
use have been eclipsed, carriers
trying to employ synthetic data
still face challenges, including
data quality and storage.
to face these challenges, in-
surers must learn how to iden-
tify the best data elements to
synthesize.
however, with organic
growth and finer risk segmenta-
tion imperatives, the upside of
synthetic data is too great to
ignore. Story on page 8

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Business process management is helping insurers such as Farmers and Meadowbrook transform new and existing operations for the better. What’s the trick?

PAGE 12

The Path to Automated
Underwriting
By Joe McKendrick
>>Case s Tudy

While long a goal of it,
only in recent years has auto-
mated underwriting become
feasible from a technical
sense. Yet, for allied World
assurance, technical feasibil-
ity alone was insufficient to
achieve its goal of enabling
producers to automate busi-
ness via the Web. Years of
evolution and improvements
later, the company launched a
rule-based self-service tool
that allows producers to com-
plete end-to-end insurance
transactions—without the
need for an underwriter.

If your internal data is flawed, you are building on sand.

Story on page 8

Policy admin Choices

11James Klauer, fidelity investment life insurance, shares his rationale for systems replacement.

Virtualization Justified

18desktop virtualization solves problems, such as data loss, users face on individual machines.

Putting BI to Work

a recent study reveals what insurers should expect when they implement a business intelligence platform. among the findings: how long Bi implementation really takes.

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