Power BI in insurance: A perfect fit
Data is a powerful tool, and insurance businesses have vast quantities of it from multiple sources. If that data is relevant, well-managed and presented in a meaningful way, it can enable deep insight right across the organization. It can help get new products to market quickly, enable deeper customer relationships, and provide the understanding needed to control costs, manage risk and identify new opportunities. Microsoft Office, SQL Server and Power BI – including tools like Excel, Azure, Power Pivot, Power View and Power Map – are part of a cloud platform that enables the fast and efficient gathering, storing, mining and analysis of data. Let’s take a look at how these technologies fit with the needs of insurance businesses.
Power to present
Power BI and the BI Suite enable you to create and share business insight using Excel, the tool of choice for most insurers when it comes to data manipulation. Power Pivot enables fast manipulation of large datasets in Excel, while Power View allows you to create interactive reports that can be embedded in blogs and websites. Because the tools are integrated with the web, it’s easy to incorporate the results of your dataset into a PowerPoint presentation that protects the live connection to the data – so the insights you share will be dynamic, interactive and up-to-date.
Insight on the go
Field workers such as agents, actuaries and claims adjusters play a key role in insurance businesses, and it’s important to give those workers access to real-time, interactive data when they are in front of the customer. Power BI enables mobile workers to view and interact with Excel and Power View content, and to view Power BI reports on any device so they are equipped with all the information they need to build strong customer relationships.
Customer-centricity
Putting the customer at the center of the business is critical in a competitive market like insurance. A 360-degree view of your customer’s activity across the organization, their purchasing habits and preferences, can enable your staff to provide the differentiated experience that will attract new customers and build the loyalty of existing ones.
Power BI has the ability to analyze your customer base, enabling you to understand the value that each customer brings to your bottom line. By better understanding the financial impact of each customer, you can identify opportunities for increased revenue and lower cost scenarios in managing your relationship with them.
Mapping exposure
Up-to-date insight based on real-time information is one thing, but the gift of foresight must be on every insurer’s wish list. Who wouldn’t be glad to know when and where a problem would hit, so we could take action to mitigate the risk beforehand? The visual presentation capabilities of Power Map, combined with the predictive analytics of Azure Machine Learning, is capable of providing that foresight.
For example, we all hope we won’t see another storm like Superstorm Sandy – but if we did, and you could know the exact path of the storm and the assets that you insure within that path, you could decide whether to remove those assets to a safe place in order to better manage your exposure. Using Power Map and Azure ML (Machine Learning), you can marry weather data with catastrophic risk modelling data, using tools that you already have within your Microsoft investment to do geospatial modelling relating to that risk. So if you were looking at a high net worth individual who had a lot of art in their home, and you recognized that your exposure was a couple of million dollars, that insight could inform your decision on whether or not to spend a few thousand on moving the art to a secure location.
These are just a few of the ways Power BI and the Microsoft platform can enable business intelligence for insurers. It starts with the quality, relevance and integrity of the data, and that’s a key strength of the Microsoft platform. We can incorporate structured or unstructured data from multiple sources, whether those are Microsoft technologies, competitive databases or the Internet of Things. We can store it in SQL, SQL Azure or other cloud-based products, mine it using Azure Machine Learning, and then analyze it using HD Insight, Excel and the Power BI tools.
If you’d like to know more about how Power BI and the BI Suite fits with your business goals, email me mentioning this blog post and we can set up a discussion.
