Toronto, Ontario – January 27, 2020 – Data Analytics has become a primary concern within the insurance industry, and this is true for the mutual insurance industry as well. The Cognition+ Mutual Insurance Community required a market-leading solution with a cost-effective approach in order to ‘unlock’ data insights for the Mutuals. Prior to the new analytics solution, Mutual companies were relying on static reports with limited ‘drill down’ capabilities. With the new solution, Mutuals are now able to get immediate access to their own company data at a granular level specific to their organization. As a result, these Mutuals have increased confidence in their data and can quickly and accurately report KPIs, including statistics for reporting requirements and decision making for products, pricing, and acceptance. With nightly reloads of data for each company, they are working off fresh, up-to-date data. Before the Insurance Accelerator, there was unnecessary time spent on extracting data, consolidating and validating, and creating reports for distribution. This used to take hours and in some cases days, with the potential for errors being a greater risk, which was a distraction to the companies and loss of expense dollars. With the time savings, companies have redirected their efforts to focus on analysis and action in many areas of the business to ensure they remain competitive within the industry. Being able to provide data at their fingertips at all levels of the company ensures a heightened understanding of their business.
The Accelerator consists of four pre-built applications that contain over 144 insurance charts. The four applications include Workflow, Agent & Broker Performance, Governance, and Operations.
The Governance application provides a high-level overview of key financial and insurance metrics that would be of interest to Board of Director members and executives. Application metrics, such as gross and net loss ratios, expense ratios, net income and surplus, are available for company financial health monitoring and analysis purposes. In addition, policy count changes, new/cancelled and lapsed policies, retention rates, operational and acquisition expense ratio can be monitored.
The Operations application provides the ability for management and staff to easily analyze and monitor their operations. It focuses on business retention and growth, the impacts of discounts and charges, policies in force, profitability analysis and diagnostics, and claims analysis including large loss analysis. In addition, the application can analyze claims triangles, claims severity and profitability by postal code.
The Agent and Broker Performance application focuses on metrics for monitoring and managing the performance of the sales force. This is beneficial to meet with agent or brokers regarding their performance and to send out status reports. This application also provides information to analyze agent and/or broker new endorsements and activity on files to assist in balancing workload distribution.
The Workflow application allows for the monitoring and planning of pending work. It provides insight into how many renewals have been processed and how many are remaining. Keeping brokers engaged and enthused is key and managing service level agreements is becoming increasingly important; having the ability to examine the process in detail and provide the sales representative or policyholders the completed change to their policy is important.
The Accelerator was implemented and deployed by BizXcel Inc. originally for 8 Cognition+ Mutual Insurance Companies in late 2017 as a decentralized solution. In June 2018, BizXcel and Cognition+ entered into a strategic partnership for the purposes of providing ‘ready to go’ insurance templates powered by Qlik Sense® that access the Cognition+ solutions at each mutual and provides a centralized custom Qlik Sense solution to mutual insurers with increased reporting and insights from their data. The new partnership allowed the Mutual companies to participate in the centralized solution enabling commonality of process – all enhancements, maintenance, and upgrades are all pushed out to the community at the same time. It also saved money on infrastructure by removing the need for infrastructure deployments at more than 20 insurance companies and allowed for a ‘bulk buying’ software agreement for the Qlik Sense licenses. The shared intellectual property through this partnership is driving huge cost savings across these Mutuals allowing them to focus their resources elsewhere.
One example of a huge benefit for this community is saving an entire 80 hours per year because of the claims report alone inside the Insurance Template. Previously, this report was taking companies 20+ hours each quarter to gather the number from different data sources which left the door open for human error. By producing the claims report faster, it has lead to immediate communication and strategic decisions are clients, products and services and avoiding any late penalties for reporting which keeps the Mutual Community in good standing.
Business Impact
Service Standards:
Previously, we manually reviewed endorsements and new business for standards using Excel. Small samples sizes were prone to error and collecting all data manually was inefficient. With the Cognition+ Insurance Analytics tool, we can see exact response times, make comparisons, understand trends and communicate standards to the sales force while saving hours each month.
Portfolio Analysis & Performance:
The Cognition+ Insurance Analytics allows us to target areas of poor results with premium increases. This helps us improve our performance without jeopardizing our competitive position. We can apply target rates on deserving segments as opposed to across-the-board rate increases. One Mutual member used it to target a rate increase which helped improve their income by approximately $500,000. They were also able to identify a pocket of poor performance and target it with a double-digit increase. This information, combined with their market intelligence, allowed them to raise rates by 15%.
Speed to Market:
The timeframe and cost were significantly less than any singular implementation of a BI solution. Each implementation took only 4-6 weeks. We estimate the whole project was accomplished at 25% of the potential cost in both time and money compared to a non-standardized BI solution.
About Cognition+
The Cognition+ Mutual Insurance Community is a group of 32 mutual insurance companies across Canada that own their own software provider, Cognition+. Cognition+ was established in 1996 to provide innovative software solutions to the Farm Mutual Insurance community. Since that time, the ownership model has expanded to include mutual insurers in 5 Canadian provinces. The Cognition+ Mutual Insurance Community utilizes a fully integrated insurance platform that currently enables over $900 million in volume to be processed annually across an omnichannel distribution approach. The Cognition+ Mutual Insurance Community uses the strength of Mutuality to chart their own technology future through strong partnerships with like-minded entities. Cognition+, in partnership with BizXcel (a long-standing mutual partner), has provided the Cognition+ Mutual Insurance Community with a leading approach to Business Intelligence to further enhance their mutual business operations.
About BizXcel+
BizXcel was formed in 2005 through a collaboration of two companies, an Information Technology company – WoodRidge Data Solutions – and a training, consulting and facilitation company – Volition Alliance. The dynamic team at BizXcel specializes in creating solutions that meet the needs of the people and organizational structures within their clients’ companies, by focusing on their planning, people, processes and information from a holistic viewpoint. BizXcel has extensive experience in a diverse spectrum of industries including financial services, manufacturing, retail and wholesale, communications, not-for-profit, health care, education and First Nations’ organizations. BizXcel believes in making companies and individuals better than they are today by helping them get unstuck so they look great, their work is less stressful, and they can focus on what’s really important.
BizXcel has been providing innovative data and strategy solutions to the Mutual Community directly and through its association with the Ontario Mutual Insurance Association (OMIA) and Farm Mutual Re. For more information, visit www.bizxcel.com.