Making long tail risk more predictive when it comes to specialist underwriting such as specialist construction insurance.

The challenge 

GIROUX.ai was commissioned by the client to conduct an independent review on how underwriting was performed for their specialist construction insurance business.

It became apparent that the underwriting team was performing their work using scattered inspection documents and various brokers bordereaux alongside a lot of disparate Excel spreadsheets.

The client needed to put the right controls and underwriting data platform in place to address its growing operational risks, as most of their policies lasted at least 10 years and a lot of data needed to be fed into the process to ensure the profitability of the book. 

What were they using before?

Before choosing GIROUX.ai, our client’s team was using basic spreadsheets to track quotes and was becoming increasingly aware that this was not a viable, long-term solution.

A new IT system was in the pipeline for the company but they decided to focus initially on their data analytics requirements.

What were the benefits of GIROUX.ai?

The GIROUX platform allowed the client to:

• Automatically produce rich aggregation reports by developer, builder, projects and programmes to ensure constant monitoring of risks
•  Analyse various and complex types of cover
• Carry out predictive analyses on possible insolvency risks
• Time dimensions to allow for analyses by construction dates and milestones, inception date, and practical completion date.
• Carry out analyses by binders and other key attributes, such as construction types, project types, types of building usage etc. 

The results

Our client has been able to benefit from the following results:

• The implementation of the GIROUX analytics platform has demonstrated the value of data discipline when it comes to preparing and formatting data ready for input into systems.
• There is no longer the need to rekey data into several places as it now comes from a single source and is updated everywhere that is required. In addition, this has reduced the risk of human error anddata discrepancies.
• Aggregation report that used to take weeks can now be generated at the click of a button, saving countless hours of work throughout the year.
• In the longer-term, the client is now working on a single IT system which can ‘talk’ directly to the GIROUX platform, without the need for human intervention to upload information.

As a result of these improvements, the company has enjoyed numerous benefits. Along with freeing up time for the team to concentrate on client-facing activities, the capacity provider relationship has also improved considerably.

The GIROUX platform will also allow our client to stand head and shoulders above the competition and raise the bar for industry data analysis and reporting. Of course, it is always difficult to predict where future losses will come from, but having a large, diversified portfolio willhelp the client to weather any future storms with more confidence.

Furthermore, the client is now able to look at past performance in more detail by noticing trends from certain sub-sets which have performed better or worse over the years and demonstrate to their underwriter that they have a high-quality, robust portfolio.