The insurance industry has gone through many changes in the past few years. The interaction between insurers and customers has changed a great deal and strong competition is forcing insurers to take quick steps in building closer ties with their customers. There are many business intelligence tools out there which work great for insurers and can help them bring out significant changes to their bottom line.

Various business intelligence tools provide sourcing, collection and analysis of information and some of the key factors which drive the BI solution for an insurer are:

Competition from Banks: – Banks are new players in the insurance field and they take away huge amount of business from both the personal and commercial space.

Customer Centric Market: – Earlier the insurance industry was dependent on a product centric approach but nowadays it has been converted into customer centric products and with pricing to suit the heterogeneous needs of the customers.

Mergers and Acquisition: – When two insurers are merged, it is essential to have an unified view of the customer data of both the companies for better utilization of assets.

While developing a BI solution, there are 3 processes evolved:

1. Sourcing of the data from all possible sources
2. Storing of the data in a central data warehouse which will have historical data along with the current data
3. Analysis or reporting of the data

The essence of the BI solution is to provide insights on the data which will help insurers bring a better and more valuable understanding of the data which they possess. The data will draw results in terms of cross selling and more once the customer is understood better.

A BI solution can provide a means to monitor everyday activity for quick decision making and corrections along with many other needs of insurers:

• As the data is stored in a central data warehouse, there would be only a single access for all information on policies, claims, renewals and grievances of the insured
• Using BI reports top management can get deep insights about the business which can help them in quick decision making
• BI reports can further be used to identify the trend of the business as well as monitor performance management across all business function
• The data warehouse will have all the historical data along with the current data, which is used to build various reports.

Power BI in the insurance sector provides the right information, to the right people, in a timely manner, allowing employees to solve complex issues, react quickly to market trends and drive efficiencies throughout the business. In an industry that is so incredibly unpredictable, BI can bring in the much needed visibility to your business health and work to grow it via avenues which would have been else unknown to you.