QBE Insurance Group has announced a partnership that enables the firm to accelerate its adoption of advanced analytics for providing consumers with better coverage at a fairer price.
Through QBE Ventures, the insurer has closed an investment into Cytora, a London-based start-up that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and open-source data to help commercial insurers in risk selection and pricing; and has also inked a commercial-use agreement for the Cytora product.
The deal will allow QBE to deploy the Cytora Risk Engine across its property and casualty lines in 2018.
Driven by machine-learning algorithms, the Cytora Risk Engine generates a risk score on a specific cover based on an insurer's internal data as well as from a wide spectrum of external sources. This risk score then provides an insurer with an enhanced insights into expected claims activity on the whole portfolio and also at an individual risk level.
“Combining external information with our own internal intelligence gives a more complete view of a risk, which in turn enables QBE to provide protection to our customers at a fairer price that reflects the true level of exposure,” said Richard Pryce, CEO for QBE European operations. “The partnership with Cytora enables us to accelerate the adoption of advanced analytics in our business and complements the expertise we have been developing in-house. Cytora’s technology has broader application beyond risk scoring and will enable us to identify attractive areas that match our risk appetite and expertise but where we are currently underrepresented. This will assist us to focus our efforts on the customer relationships where we can add greatest value.”
The Cytora deal is the second partnership entered by QBE since QBE Ventures was set up earlier this year. The first was with RiskGenius, a machine-learning platform for analysing policy wordings.
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