According to Stephen Cross (2014), chief executive of the Aon Global Risk Insights Platform, "smart players in the insurance and reinsurance industry recognise the urgent need to modernise. The complexity of risk and the need to get risk management profiles right are leading reinsurance firms towards advanced big data analytics". Aon Global Risk Insight Platform® (GRIP) is a global repository of risk and insurance placement information.

Aon GRIP provides web-accessible data to help Aon brokers and account executives evaluate which markets will likely be interested in a given placement type and which insurance carriers are likely to provide the best value for clients. The GRIP benchmarking tool compares clients against their peers in terms of coverage limits, exposures, premium spend and rate. The GRIP broker dashboard helps Aon brokers select specific, views of marketplace developments such as pricing trends and forecasts and carrier quoting behaviors (based upon Aon client discussion brochure).

The following material is excerpted from a Financial Times article by Cross (2014):

"Aon spends $250 million (£147 million) every year on data and analytics in the risk space alone. Everything we seek to do at Aon is to improve risk, reduce risk and help put our insured clients in a strong position when either retaining risk or placing risk. The ultimate goal for us is improving risk profiles and better assessing how we and our insurance partners approach risk."

"The insurance sector has often relied on a combination of bespoke deals for large underwriting, and different types of individual and event risk profiling for commodity insurance. Both are reliant on the expertise and experience of underwriters and brokers.

"However, the big problem with the way things have been done is that decisions are based primarily on historic data, rather than predictive market trends and analytics."

"Aon has become much smarter about data in recent years, focusing on advanced analytics, which show in real time what is happening in the marketplace. We run a global centre for innovation and analytics, established in Ireland in 2008, as well as a newer centre in Singapore."

"We have also established what we call the Global Risk Insights Platform (GRIP), which is the world's largest proprietary database of insurance placement data. This system takes billing data from our annual premium flow of over $80 billion of insurance, coupled with quotation data brokered by over 6,500 personnel around the world, in order to provide clients and underwriters with key trends and data analysis at their fingertips."

"The reason for doing this is that the insurance marketplace is very fluid. Insurers often want to have a clearer picture of the risk they are underwriting and having the right data helps them to sharpen their risk appetite. Analytics is really able to help in a post-financial crash environment in which companies have to focus hard on cutting costs yet simultaneously wish to improve their risk profile."

"The difficulty with excelling in the analytics business is that it requires different types of talent with different skillsets. As an example, we need the highest skilled data scientists in our global analytic centres. "

"This inevitably puts us in a talent competition directly against other local businesses that rely heavily on analytics, such as betting firm Paddy Power. It also positions us against locally based technology companies such as Google and Apple. We based the first centre in Ireland, because we already had a strong business there, and there was a high quality pool of technical and analytical talent available following the problems of the economic crash."

Cross concludes "The growth of technology, and emerging opportunities and risks, are the new dimensions in which the insurance industry needs to consider. There is a great potential to do better to analyse risk for businesses and improve how we help business. It will be the next steps we take, with technology, data analytics and expertise, that will make all the difference."

Keywords : big data, cyber security, Aon, Aon GRIP, Stephen Cross Aon, Global Risk Insights Platform, big data analytics

References

Cross, S., "What big data analytics achieve in world of risk," Financial Times, May 19, 2014 at URL http://capgemini.ft.com/big-data-and-little-data/what-big-data-analytics-achieve-in-world-of-risk_a-28-322.html