Data in insurance is not only about technology

In October 2015, I explained that insurers had to hire more data experts if they wanted to better leverage all sorts of data sources they can access nowadays. As I raised this point, I shared the result of a survey we launched in 2015 to identify whether insurance companies were hiring new types of profiles to complement their teams looking at data. For more on this, read the following post: Why the insurance industry needs more data scientists. In March last year, I explained that insurers attempt to hire more data expert had become a clear trend: Insurers are investing in data scientists. With the growing importance of data in insurance and taking into consideration all the activities currently happening around data notably supported by InsurTech companies, we identify that not only insurers are hiring highly qualified data experts but also that these people are getting more and more influential within their organization. Indeed when asked about the level of influence on key business decisions these experts (internal or external consultants) have in their organization it seems that data scientists are gaining more power ​(in % of insurance respondents; n=135): Actually, two categories of experts are gaining influence in insurance: data scientists and user experience specialists. We are not surprised by this result. Insurers deal with a greater amount of data and more sophisticated technologies, therefore they need to hire highly educated experts in order to valuably leverage this data and these technologies. In addition, insurers consider customer interaction to be a key element of their digitization efforts and this is the reason why they are giving more responsibilities to user experience specialists. We will soon publish a report detailing the result of an insurance survey on the use of consumer data and smart technologies. I recommend you take some time to read our report to better understand what insurers are doing around this topic.