How insurers can unlock historical data for business growth
Discover how to better leverage historical data to forecast trends and enhance the bottom line.
To many insurance professionals, the phrase “backup data” conjures thoughts of regulatory compliance and risk mitigation. While it’s true that backup data is essential for these efforts, it also holds the key to business growth — something insurers don’t typically associate with backup and, therefore, miss out on.
Backup data is a living record of a company’s entire history. This historical data can lead to insights into business and market trends that help propel success. After all, understanding what’s happened in the past is the best way to prepare for the future.
Here’s how insurance firms can better leverage historical data to forecast trends, enhance customer service and improve bottom lines.
Locating, leveraging historical data
Insurers have always relied on data — it’s the backbone of processes like underwriting and risk assessment. Without it, insurers would be in the dark when writing policies and conducting daily business. Increasingly, the data they rely on is data stored in the cloud. According to research by Novarica, since 2018, the percentage of insurers using cloud computing has increased from about 70% to more than 90%, and three-quarters of insurers are planning to continue expanding their use of the cloud in the next 18 months.
With so much business being conducted in cloud-based or software as a service (SaaS) apps like Salesforce, it only makes sense that insurers maximize that data’s value by reusing it for other strategic purposes. For example, by integrating that data into popular operational and analytic tools, they can understand a client’s entire history and offer more personalized and relevant services, strengthening customer relationships. And by comparing that data with similar customer lifecycles, insurers can better upsell and cross-sell services.
Detailed historical SaaS data can also help insurers create more accurate models for policy writing by incorporating every relevant piece of information they have stored away. Additionally, as the use of AI becomes more commonplace across the insurance industry, historical data can be used to feed those training sets.
To get the most value and insights from historical data, insurers must reuse it in tools outside of the apps themselves. By feeding data into popular solutions — such as Tableau, Amazon AWS (Redshift, QuickSight, SageMaker), Microsoft Azure (Power BI, Analysis Services), Snowflake and others — data can be contextualized for actionable insights.
SaaS app data can be a locked box
To leverage the benefits of historical SaaS app data for these purposes, employees across an insurance organization must first be able to access it. Unfortunately, when organizations attempt to access data stored in SaaS apps via the common method of application program interfaces (APIs), they can suffer unintended consequences.
SaaS app vendors place limits on the number of API requests a client can make within a certain timeframe. If a company exceeds its limit, the app will not respond or it will charge the subscriber for overages. Insurers want to avoid both situations.
Beyond this obstacle, APIs require a large investment of time and money by insurers’ IT teams. These expenses will only increase as organizations rely more and more on cloud applications — at a certain point, it will become too arduous for IT teams to maintain APIs if it hasn’t already.
When insurers can access historical SaaS app data with APIs, they must then download, make copies and store the information they want to reuse in their locations. These locations, which may include personal devices and a variety of file folders, are often not secure and can increase vulnerable access points as well as complicate “auditability.” This data sprawl can also lead to inaccuracies stemming from multiple versions of the same data sets. Insurers can’t be confident they are basing decisions on accurate information.
Because of these obstacles, the wealth of information residing in SaaS apps often goes untapped, sitting unused, or is misused and becomes a liability.
Ownership is key
Luckily, there’s a highly effective way for insurers to begin leveraging SaaS app data. The key is data ownership.
Simply reclaiming ownership of historical SaaS app data allows organizations to enable authorized access to it from any place at any time and, in turn, reuse it to better serve customers and drive business forward.
The best way to secure ownership is by storing data in the insurer’s own cloud data lake, such as AWS, as opposed to the vendor’s app. Doing this ensures they aren’t at the mercy of a third party’s data storage and access restrictions.
When insurers maintain possession of their SaaS app data and use a high-fidelity backup to capture up to every change made over time, they ensure it’s complete and up to date. This way, employees are tapping into a single source of truth.
Ownership also enables companies to easily stream historical information directly from their own cloud data lake into their preferred analytics and operational tools. This is where the big payoff comes — reusing historical data to make better decisions and take more effective actions.
The bottom line? Insurance organizations have always embraced the value of data. Now they need to do the same with data from SaaS applications. Today, this information is often siloed and locked away, but prioritizing ownership and access allows companies to put it to use, anywhere, anytime and more quickly reap the benefits of the digital age.
Joe Gaska (grax@v2comm.com) is CEO of GRAX, the SaaS data backup solution.
Opinions expressed here are the author’s own.
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