Better data key to navigating a firming insurance market

The past several years have seen a dramatic increase in uncertainty around the globe in all facets of business and society. From the pandemic and sharp uptick in crime to new and ongoing geopolitical conflicts, a groundswell of far-reaching events, both regional and worldwide, has led to a firming insurance market and rise in overall premiums. This makes it challenging both for insurance managers to control premium costs and for risk professionals to assess enterprise risk accurately and comprehensively.

The current insurance market is a very challenging place. While there are some early signs of the market plateauing, it is still very much a challenge to secure the capacity required at an acceptable price, and there is certainly less competition among insurance carriers.

RMIS Software for an evolving insurance landscape

A RMIS platform provides organisations with standardised, data-driven risk management solutions for keeping up with a rapidly changing risk landscape. A risk assessment software platform enables organisations to maintain property and asset-specific risk data, helping to streamline the carrier quotation process using structured, organised data. This specificity allows for better prioritisation of risk management processes and resources — efforts that could help to reduce premiums and improve policy terms.

Furthermore, there are measurable business advantages to leveraging advanced analytics solutions that provide predictive modeling and benchmarking data to empower organisations to make better decisions. With a unified risk assessment software platform in place, organisations retain control and more flexibility in migrating to new carriers. Firms are also empowered to continuously monitor, predict and respond to risk in the shifting business landscape.

For example, companies have experienced an increased level of scrutiny about the underwriting data as well as an increase in the overall amount of information required. Pertinent data regarding key suppliers and business continuity plans are now required to properly assess business interruption exposure and supply chain risks. Insurers need to make sure they really understand the relevant business risks and are therefore much more interested in the accuracy of the values provided and how current data trends against benchmarks from previous years.

A RMIS also allows organisations to achieve stronger negotiation capabilities when interfacing with carriers — chiefly, by way of deeper insights regarding their own data. By gaining awareness regarding their own risk posture, firms are better positioned to paint an accurate picture of their enterprise risk to insurance carriers during the quotation process. Companies still using excel spreadsheets to collect data, distributing the information to every single entity around the world individually, and then attempting to manually consolidate and review the outputs, are simply not equipped to survive the hardening market. Looking at long-term trends and spotting any deviations is just too difficult when you have a huge number of individual spreadsheets. This is where the power of advanced analytics will really bear fruit for companies that are ahead of the curve.

Data quality is a modern-day imperative

What is key for buyers of global programmes is confidence in their global data and that it accurately reflects their risk profile. There are some key capabilities that can help provide the best quality data:

• Re-assignment or delegation to make it easy for managing the changing contacts.
• In-built validation to ensure the amounts entered are sensible and/or confirm why they have changed so much from prior years.
• Selecting the property or building address via Google Maps to ensure accurate geocoding and identifying its location.
• Allow for larger asset collections local users to load spreadsheets of data from their asset management systems.

Organisations can’t mitigate or transfer risks of which they are not aware. A risk platform enables both enterprises and carriers to maintain continuous visibility into new and emerging risks in the environment, allowing them to quickly determine whether, based on the organisation’s current risk posture, existing or proposed policies have coverage gaps and/or deficiencies.

In short, enterprises facing a firming insurance market are well-advised to counter increasingly competitive conditions with data-driven efforts; specifically, to provide insurance carriers with the proper tools to make better-informed policy decisions. Naturally, the more self-aware an organisation is regarding its own risk exposures, the better its risk management/mitigation efforts; insurance carriers are also empowered to be more competitive in pricing their policies.

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