London insurance companies must collaborate over big data or face a struggle to compete on a global scale, warned a new report today.
Insurance software specialist Xuber said industry rivals must set their differences aside and share their data to unlock its value by analysing it for business insights.
Brokers and carriers guilty of failing to co-operate are lagging behind on a global scale, admitted Faber’s executive director of operations, David Berg, in the report, titled ‘Mind The Gap: The Changing Landscape of the London Insurance Market‘.
Richard Clark, head of business development and specialist commercial at Xuber, added: "The market faces several challenges over the coming years if it is to maintain its stronghold – and one of these is the need to utilise its data.
"The London market has so far failed to collaborate in its attempts to leverage data. A market or company’s use of big data provides it with a point of differentiation from its competitors; it is no longer a case of it being a value-added service, but rather integral to survival – a Darwinian challenge with those left behind unlikely to survive."
The report outlined the difficulties over using and sharing confidential client data, a challenge that will soon be thrown into the spotlight with updated EU data regulations soon being passed into law.
However, it added that more must be done to aggregate anonymised data to give the London market a competitive edge.
John Muir, head of claims operations at Willis Limited, said: "Data is beneficial in the long-term to everybody, it creates healthy competition. Clients give data to us in different ways, data will never come perfectly."
The report recommended training users to get the best out of big data, as well as outlining the risks of inaccuracy in social media-derived data.
This echoed Oracle’s view, when it told CBR in February that companies that have not curated data properly could be relying on inaccurate information.
