‘Timing is everything’ is a fact readily acknowledged by the team at LexisNexis Risk Solutions and encapsulated by this year’s theme of its annual Customer Advisory Meeting – disruption and its competitive edge. It’s interesting how a theme decided upon many months previously can prove so pertinent, noted Martyn Mathews (pictured above), senior director of personal lines at LexisNexis Risk Solutions (UK & Ireland), particularly considering this is the first UK conference the business has ever run virtually.
Mathews noted that the team will be talking to clients to explore how they can help them negotiate the ever-changing technology and regulatory space. Looking at the significant change curve currently facing businesses, he said, there is a data element to it but it also feeds into the technology sphere - and so the business is launching a variety of timely, client-centric solutions.
“One is for the broker market where we’re looking to help those brokers who perhaps haven’t had access to the same level of data and data enrichment as the rest of the market,” he said. “We want to help those businesses get up to speed with everybody else so that they can drive better decisions on behalf of their customers, as well as better pricing and underwriting. That’s going to be a big theme that runs through the conference this year.”
Another key theme will revolve around why now is as an exciting time for the insurance market, Mathews said, offering opportunities to harness new data and technology to write segments of business they may not have been able to previously. In-vehicle technology is a case in point with insurers and brokers now able to harness data from a connected vehicle. New opportunities for innovation are cropping up all the time and, with mileage-based insurance products inevitably becoming more of a standard post-COVID, LexisNexis Risk Solutions is on hand to help businesses innovate in this space.
The Emailage Rapid product, introduced by the business back in January, is a particularly interesting offering, said James Burton (pictured below), senior director of product management, UK and Ireland, as it highlights the need to create a better understanding of the digital identity of a consumer. While traditionally, risk assessment is based on a variety of factors from your name, address, date of both, claims history – Emailage recognises the consistency of an email address over the lifespan of an individual.
“This product goes into [a deep] level of granularity,” he said, “and looks at the risk of an email address. How old is it? Is it an old email address, or was it literally set up today? How many times have we seen that email address in the database? Are there any fraud indicators attached to that email address that we should be thinking slightly differently about? And all this is great because there is a lot of interest in the space of digital identity.”
The ‘know your customer’ piece is a key underlying driver to the work LexisNexis Risk Solutions is doing, he said, as showcased by its recent partnership with Cazana, to speed up access to vehicle data. Using data more effectively leads to better decision making and, coming from a financial services background, Burton has seen a ramped-up understanding across the insurance space of the need to know customers well, in order to anticipate their needs.
With so many acquisitions going on right now, particularly within the broker space, he said, larger organisations are acquiring smaller ones and bringing on their books of policies. Within these books, there may well be consumers who are sat across different books – for example, with a commercial lines policy and then perhaps several personal lines policies on a different database. In such a case, really knowing your customer on a one-to-one basis streamlines the amount of information being received, preventing the sort of poor customer experience that is receiving three letters or emails where one would suffice. With this in mind, LexisNexis Risk Solutions recently launched a product called LexID which links disparate information into a single customer view, thus ensuring efficient communication.
Mathews highlighted that a challenge for the team in the run-up to the conference has been making sure its own content is highly relevant, and this has meant talking to the market all the time to determine what they need. From these discussions, he has seen that the market is very interested in addressing the changing regulatory environment that will affect the insurance industry, and subjects such as price walking.
Having those discussions is invaluable, he said, and leads to the creation of innovative solutions based on market requirements, including LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ recent development of a contributory claims database. Claims data is an essential part of the insurance process, whether that’s about making sure a policy is being underwritten in the right way or that the right products are being offered to the right people.
“But there is space for improvement,” he said. “And therefore we’re launching this contributory database that will look at the holistic claims of an individual – be that household or motor, and, in some instances, small commercial risks as well. We’re starting with the household claims product, which is going to give insurers better and more granular insight into the claims history of an individual.
“Fresh and new quality data is going to be introduced to the claims process that, over time, is going to produce a holistic view of an individual so that their individual risk comes to the fore. The market is very excited by this prospect because they have worked with claims data before but it hasn’t always been able to operate in quite the same way… So as that develops over the next 12 months or so, it will be a very exciting initiative for us.”
