Many might think that predictive analytics — that wonder technology that can analyze and detect patterns in organized data sets — is only good for one thing: fighting fraud. But in her presentation at Harmon Solutions Group's 2008 North American Insurance Claims Summit, TowerGroup Insurance Analyst Karen Pauli shed some light on seven other claim-related areas that the promising technology could have significant influence.

"The old objectives claim organizations used to have about timely payments, eliminating processing deficiencies, and others used to be the main claim objectives and those are still good ones, but what TowerGroup is seeing is leading claim organizations coming up with new imperatives and creating objectives around an array of topics," said Pauli, who has an extensive claims background with companies such as OneBeacon and Crum & Forster.

Pauli said that TowerGroup was able to determine these objectives through its own research, which was conducted through extensive interviewing of hundreds of high-level claim professionals. Specifically, she discussed how predictive analytics can help in eight major claim management objectives: claim management, vendor performance, subrogation, litigation, reserves management, catastrophe response, compliance, and the aforementioned fraud detection and reduction.