Digital Transformation Project Group 35: Using GPS data in Big Data analytics (Achmea)

Companies have difficulties dealing with the fast rising amount of data and the process of deep analytics, while the mining of (un)structured data offers big opportunities for firms to gain a competitive advantage. Our report offers a solution for Achmea to gain such a competitive advantage.

Why Big data? Because the topic of Big Data is extremely hot. The trend can be seen everywhere like with the Bonuscard from Albert Heijn or the scanning social media by advertising companies. Even our BIM master is recently offering a Big Data elective. See this graph of Google search trends on Big Data:

Why the insurance business and why Achmea? The insurance industry is big, with over 54.000 employees and 75 billion euro premiums in The Netherlands in 2013. Achmea possesses a 25% market share in this industry. The core business consist of non-life insurance, health insurance, income protection insurance, term-life insurance and investments of the premiums contributed. Following the current trends and developments in the insurance business Achmea has to stay up-to-date with this rising and emergent technologies in order to deal with the fierce competition and to fulfil customer needs. Information Technology has also taken an important role in the current business model, because most insurance companies invest a lot of money in IT and lots of sales are done online.

Insurance has always been a data intensive industry. Regulation has pushed insurers to push data governance and data quality across the organisation. The more forward looking insurers have seen it a opportunity to get more value out of the data. Coupled with that insurers now have access to new source of data, such as GPS data. Data has been an important topic for insurers for a long time, which makes insurer professionals really data savvy already. Some of the key challenges and benefits are:

Challenges:
– Creating a single organisation wide view
– Very large volumes of unstructured data, great insights and great value, but locked away and hard to get to

Benefits:
– Significant reduction in fraud rates
– Improved pricing: higher pricing for higher risks but also lower pricing for lower risks
– Improves process efficiency

Big Data and also GPS data are a valuable addition to the current data management. Adding GPS data to the enormous pile of information and analyse it will help increasing the value of this information. Namely, because GPS will add the components ‘time’ and ‘place’ to the huge amount of information already available. We argue that the best solution to do this is by including a GPS feature in the phone of the client. It is not said that GPS is necessary but it is argued that GPS is a valuable contribution to the total process of deep analytics.

Eventually the use of Big data will become standard, so it will be inevitable to use Big Data in best possible way. So, the process of deep analytics, including the use of GPS data is one of the next steps in the future of the insurance businesses. Eventually this should lead to a change of behaviour, services and product of insurance companies.