In a televised interview segment, Chubb chairman and CEO Evan Greenberg revealed that his company not only invests more than a billion dollars in technology annually, but is moving towards the utilisation of big data.
Speaking on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money program on CNBC, Greenberg explained why Chubb spends so much on digitising its business.
“You know, we spend a billion dollars a year on technology,” Greenberg said. “We’re in a world that’s going from analogue to digital – everything is. If you remain analogue, you’re history.”
The CEO added that beyond digitising the insurance process, Chubb hopes to harness big data to actively help consumers foresee and mitigate future risks.
“People want anytime-anywhere service,” he said. “The notion of the product we provide – which is about repairing it or replacing it – it’s going to move towards predict and prevent, which is about using data and using Internet of Things (IoT).”
Greenberg also hints that big data can make the insurance writing process so much simpler for Chubb’s consumers, particularly commercial clients.
“Imagine our ability to service you: in claims and in underwriting. Right now, if you’re a small business, to underwrite you we ask you about 30 questions. For Chubb, over the next 18 months, that’ll come down to about seven questions, because we can just scrape the answers from data that is publicly available. [We] don’t need to bother you with that,” he told Cramer.
Hopeful for the potential that big data holds, Greenberg remarked that, given enough time and technology, Chubb might have to ask customers just two questions – their name and their address.
