AXA Hong Kong & Macau

Outstanding Enterprises

2

A GREENER FUTURE WITH DATA SCIENCE THANKS TO AXA HK AND MACAU

Nowadays, consumers have greater demand of ESG elements from businesses, whilst many corporates have been developing different initiatives to move closer to their green goals. Such was the case with AXA Hong Kong and Macau, who recently launched their “Energy Saving Campaign” – a GO GREEN home insurance campaign that aims to inspire and encourage customers to go green.

Elaine Chan, Data Science and Management Director at AXA Hong Kong and Macau, who won the Insurance - Big Data Award at the 2022 High Flyers Awards presented by Hong Kong Business this year, also drove this trailblazing campaign to build a greener future. During the interview, she shares her thoughts on the importance, challenges, and successes of AXA’s GO GREEN home insurance campaign.

The woman behind the successful use of data science in AXA HK and Macau

With over a decade of experience in the data science for insurance, Elaine sees the trend that most companies are either pioneers in data science adoption or market share titans, but never both.

“As an industry leader who has high demands in data - both in acquiring the data and in turning them into valuable action - AXA is one of the few exceptions, and I’m happy to work in such a renowned insurer as there’s a lot that I can do,” said Elaine, adding that data science has been a relatively new, granular specialisation in the industry.

In her early career, data science in the form of predictive modelling, and machine learning were still very young with businesses at that time, rarely did they adopt such innovation. With scepticism on the value and capabilities of data science, Elaine sees the value of a successful data science business application, aside from just technical glamour. This helped us to shape the data science work that takes place within AXA, which focuses more on the delivery of commercial and meaningful applications for the customers and the company.

AXA leading the fight against climate change with data science

Back in December 2020, the AXA Group announced its strategic plan of “Driving Progress 2023”, reaffirming the company’s positioning in the climate leadership, as a part of their five key strategic actions. Ever since then, AXA Hong Kong and Macau has been innovating on a handful of climate-related green campaigns, driving the needs for literature review, data investigation, and qualitative research amongst different teams such as pricing, claim, and underwriting. The collaboration between the data science team, P&C pricing team, underwriting team, and claims

PHILOSOPHY

AXA’s strategy to reduce climate-related risk is not only driving corporate Green initiatives, but also inspiring customers to kickstart their Go Green journey.

Be a BetterMe, for our better future.

FAST FACTS

• In June 2022, 39 AXA entities across the world got together to support the annual “AXA Week For Good” on sustainable and inclusive actions • AXA Hong Kong and Macau is the first insurer in Hong Kong to join the MasterCard Priceless Planet

Coalition • AXA Group continues to increase the volume of its green investment.

From €12b in 2019 to €16b in 2020 and should reach €26b by 2023

This page: Go Green Banner

Opposite page: Elaine Chan, Data Science and Management Director, AXA Hong Kong & Macau

team has been essential in model development.

The insurer’s green score generator which uses both open data and internal data to perform big data techniques and hypothesis testing , has been instrumental in the release of the ESG-related home insurance campaign with eco-friendly features, aiming to encourage consumers to combat climate change and raise the awareness on environment protection.

With big data evolving at break-neck speeds every day, the right selection of data sources and data fields for solution development stands as the key to success, no matter the volume size or source variety.

The biggest obstacle remains to be determining the right open data source, which brings value to formulated analyses. The data pattern of machine learning, the myriad of various data fields from external and internal, remains critical for any hypothesis and determining quality of the built predictive data model.

With their own big data and data science practice, AXA was positioned to further drive their sales and innovation in the insurance landscape. “Data is now a new oil that is an essential component for all industries nowadays,” commented Elaine. She added that there are now a lot more data touch points between customers and insurers because of digital applications.

By leveraging the growth of big data, insurance companies can now understand more about our customers’ purchase behaviour, protection needs, and distribution channel preference, amongst other things. These insights can help us to tailor make product offerings to meet customers’ needs.

“In fact, our customers are also aware of the use of data nowadays, and they even have higher expectations and greater demand on how to offer them the best product by utilising their data,” said Elaine.

By using the power of external data, advanced data modelling and risk pricing, AXA’s green score predictive model allows internal stakeholders to develop more precise pricing for home products or premium discounts, whilst rewarding consumers for their climatefriendly behaviour. AXA’s studies have also identified the impact of weather factors in claims and emitted the embedded green effect in the pricing model, resulting in better pricing that takes environmental friendliness into account.

AXA is committed to build a healthier planet, hence, we raise the awareness of go green, and encourage our customers to lighten their carbon footprint together.

“This serves as a foundation on how we will evolve and innovate our insurance products by using dynamic pricing to incentivise climatefriendly actions,” commented Elaine.

“Energy Saving Campaign” – a GO GREEN home insurance campaign is AXA Hong Kong and Macau’s first key milestone in integrating open data, advanced data modelling, and risk pricing into a new proposition, the company aims to explore more possibilities of new open data sources that are environmentally-related, in order to develop new scientific ways to support claims risk management and underwriting process automation.