James Harper, Chief Analytics Officer at Integra Insurance, shares his thoughts on the value of Radar…
Radar is a complete, end-to-end analytics and model deployment solution. Built specifically for insurers by insurance experts, and continually enhanced by on-going investment, development and innovation.
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JAMES HARPER: I'm James Harper, the Chief Analytics Officer at Integra Insurance. There were a number of reasons that we chose Radar to support us in our pricing sophistication work. One of them is that it's very clear and easy to interpret. Pricing algorithms, even very complicated ones, aren't hidden behind lines and lines of code that require specialist training to interpret. Everything's very graphical and therefore very transparent. And I think its ease of interpretability that applies to pricing staff and non-pricing staff as well.
One of the key benefits that we've seen from using Radar Live is the shortening of the lead time for any pricing and any price change deployments. And our lead times have gone from many weeks or sometimes many months for more complicated changes down to days, if not hours. Our personal best, we've been able to deploy a rate change to market in four hours' time. And that four hours, that's the difference between or the gap between agreeing a decision with our pricing and underwriting committee and deploying that in a live environment.
We've found a number of the components in Radar to be extremely helpful. And one example would be the GLM fitter, which we use to fit elastic net models of claims at Integra. We found them to be really powerful and much more predictive than traditional GLMs. In Radar, you can fit elastic net models very easily. It doesn't require a data science degree to do that. The results are very interpretable, easy to understand, and very transparent, which, again, we found really, really helpful to help us get an understanding of the models that we are fitting and therefore gain more confidence in them before we deploy them to market.
The fact that Radar is always evolving and improving is a feature of the product that really appeals to us at Integra. We very much view general insurance prices in the UK as an arms race where you have to keep improving just to stand still. And it comes across that WTW understand that because the product, specifically Radar, is constantly evolving. There are several updates every year that are adding either efficiencies to the existing components or adding new components, or functionality to the product.
One of our key ambitions at Integra in 2024 is to introduce predictive analytics into our claims service. In particular, we're going to look to automate some of the decisions that human staff are currently having to make, especially those that we deem to be low value and low risk, for example, low value contents claims with a low risk of fraud.
We see a big role for Radar Live in that initiative. We anticipate that we will use Radar Live to help automate some of the steps in the claims process, either using the predictive modeling components and functionality that exists within it, or use its Python integration to support the claims team. So for us, Radar has been an invaluable part of our pricing sophistication process, and we see it very much being a part of our claims analytics feature at Integra as well.
