Insurer Tech Survey Finds Predictive Modeling and Big Data Important to Claims

Xchanging, a technology services provider, has released a new survey, “The 2014 Insurance Technology and Spending Trends Report.”

The survey, conducted at the Acord Loma Forum in May 2014 encompasses responses from 75 insurance industry practitioners.

The majority of survey respondents were representatives from the life/annuity, property & casualty and reinsurance/large commercial insurance sectors.

Respondents included those at the director/project manager level (26 percent), executive level (27 percent), IT staff (16 percent) and the rest were a mix of agents, brokers, analysts and others.

The 15-question survey was designed to explore insurance technology and spending trends, but the findings surfaced a number of opportunities and challenges for insurance professionals.

• Only 11 percent of survey respondents ranked attracting qualified talent as the top challenge – this is alarmingly low given the concerning future talent gap.

• 67 percent of respondents said they expect their company’s IT budget to increase this year with 44 percent significantly increasing it (6-10 percent increase or more).

• In terms of claims technologies, respondents most value predictive modeling/analytics (42 percent) and Big Data (25 percent) as focus areas.

• 36 percent of respondents selected Big Data/analytics to have the highest likelihood of an increased investment this year, while more than a quarter (27 percent) expect mobile applications to get a boost.

• Only 8 percent ranked cybersecurity technology as the most valued – this is interesting given the attention that is being paid to electronic insurance fraud.

• 30 percent of respondents believe non-conventional sources (i.e. banks, Google) will be the biggest threat to their business.

Source: Xchanging