A few weeks ago we had our annual meeting with the Insurance WeekIn which, as in other editions, both companies in the sector and technological companies have shown us the trends that will arrive in the coming years. I had the opportunity to attend different talks, from the connected car, through microinsurance and Internet of Thing, to closing with Blockchain. All of them showed that the insurance sector is undergoing a strong change, where the combining technology with innovation is key to dealing with the process of "Digital Transformation"in which most of the companies in the sector are immersed.
And if the term "Digital Transformation"was present in all the talks I attended, they also all agreed to stress again the importance of the "Customer Experience"with great emphasis on the new generations of customers and prospective customers who are digital natives, users of different social networks, and for whom the concept is tremendously important.
Providing the necessary means to meet the expectations of these future customers is a great challenge for the sector.
But behind all these terms, "Digital Transformation", "Customer Experience", "IoT", "connected car",... ...there's a common element: data. The volume of data that an insurance company has today in its internal information sources is enormous: customer data, product data, claims data, policy data,... If we also take into account the possibility of enriching this data with external information sources, the volume of data grows exponentially.
What other sources exist to enrich our data?
We have already discussed in previous posts the sources Open Data. Open data are those data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by any person without any restriction or copyright, facilitating as far as possible interoperability with other data sets.
There are many entities that today offer a wide catalogue of open sources which we can consult both individually and on a business level. Here are some of the Open Data sources that we have at our disposal to be able to integrate with our systems, thus providing our applications with new information that we can use in different business areas.
Statistical cadastral data at district and neighbourhood level
Information available on the Madrid City Council's Open Data Portal. This source offers us information on the real estate included in the Madrid Urban Cadastre, which the General Directorate of Cadastre provides to the Madrid City Council, together with information on the different districts and municipal areas from the Madrid City Council's digital cartography.
For each property, it provides us with a series of data such as the year in which the initial operation is carried out, district identifiers, identifiers of the neighbourhood in the municipality of Madrid, identifiers of the cadastral use associated with the property, total number of properties per use in the corresponding neighbourhood, surface area of the property, ...
Census of domestic animals by district
Information available on the Madrid City Council's Open Data Portal. This source offers us the census of domestic animals, specifically dogs and cats, in the City of Madrid by district which is provided by the Illustrious College of Veterinarians of Madrid.
Sports courses
Information available on the Spanish Government's Open Data Portal. This source offers us the catalogue of courses offered by the sports schools of a given municipality in Madrid. For each course, it provides detailed information about the course, as well as the place, date and time when the activity will take place.
These are just three examples of the many open data sources available to us. The use of this external information could help different business areas, as it could be the case of the claims processing department that would have additional information of the place where a claim has occurred, such as meteorological information, cadastral data, statistics of traffic accidents in the area of the claim,... or, for example, a marketing department when identifying its target audience for a new product campaign to insure pets or the place where to launch a microinsurance campaign to cover you for a certain physical activity.
Making this information available to companies can be a very important way for different business areas, as it could help to optimize and improve different business processes, both internal and external. Having additional information that complements the internal information of the company generates a very powerful data repository on which data analysis techniques can be applied that allow us to transform this data into intelligence for our business.
It is important to keep in mind that as a company we should not just store information. It is vital to incorporate the use of advanced analytics to generate value from the stored information.
