Spotlight On: Our Pricing and Actuarial Team

Spotlight on… Our Pricing and Actuarial Team

Article written by Lucy Eruero

The Floow’s Pricing and Actuarial team help clients maximise the value from their telematics programme. They act as the key lynchpin between the client’s actuarial teams, our analytics teams and industry developments, and as such aim to collaborate with our clients to innovate and generate insights that improve underwriting and therefore drive competitive advantage and commercial success.

Telematics gives clients insights into risk that are far more granular and predictive than traditional rating factors, however, telematics is the new kid on the block and often lacks the volume of real world data that insurers like to see when building risk and pricing models.

Our P&A team therefore use their vast experience of running actuarial teams within insurers as well as working on telematics programmes with clients around the world to enable them to advise and work closely with clients; sharing experiences and know-how whilst also taking the time to listen and learn from every new engagement.

On any typical day, the team will be talking with prospects or clients about how they can help them build scoring solutions that are appropriate to their customer demographics and how they can work with their internal teams to develop their own unique IP.

When they are not out on the road or on conference calls with clients or prospects, they review the scoring management information and audit reports from data science to ensure that everything is working as expected and present these results to our clients.

They spend a lot of time working with the business development and client development teams to understand the technical requirements of our clients and feed this back internally, whilst managing expectations. But perhaps more importantly they work with the data science teams to develop new and enhanced scoring and other analytics including elements that are requested by our clients, as well as advising on and checking claims analysis regressions where they try to improve our scores and make them better at predicting our clients’ claims experience.

We talked to Andy Goldby and Jonathan Smith from our Pricing and Actuarial team to find out more about what they do, their experience and what they enjoy about working at The Floow.

Andy Goldby, Chief Actuary

Andy is a highly respected general insurance industry executive, and has been a qualified general insurance actuary for over 20 years. Prior to The Floow he spent 5 years as the Motor Underwriting and Pricing Director at Direct Line Group (the largest motor insurer in the UK), where he managed a team of 45 actuaries, statisticians and underwriters who deal with the risk and market pricing for all brands under the DLG umbrella.

At DLG, he was the sponsor of various pricing projects including external data sources and telematics. Prior to that, he was the Motor Director at Groupama.

Andy also has significant experience of industry issues built up over many years of active participation on ABI Motor Committee, MIB Levy Committee and various actuarial working parties, including one which won the Brian Hey prize for a Giro paper on the Winner’s Curse and frequently speaks at conferences.

Andy, what have been your proudest moments since joining The Floow?

I can think of two moments that immediately spring to mind. Firstly, Uri Levine, the founder of Waze, seeking me out personally at the Chicago TU event. Apparently, as a leading telematics scoring expert at the conference, he wanted to gather my views on telematics and scoring with the possible inclusion of this into his latest venture.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, working collaboratively with ACG and the USA Department of Insurance to enable ACG to release the first smartphone backed telematics insurance policy in the USA and then to go on and prove that the scores that we had hypothesised were great predictors of their claims experience and required only minor further improvement before rolling them out to more states.

How does your role influence the products delivered by The Floow?

My role gives me the opportunity to be involved in all aspects of our products, including:

• Understanding the client’s challenges and designing new product features that will help them meet these challenges

• Building confidence in The Floow’s abilities and telematics generally

• Driving new initiatives and supporting the launch of new products

• Proving that telematics is working

• Providing insightful management information to inform decision making

• Facilitating internal and external continuous refinement of products and solutions

This is all a crucial part of ensuring we continue to deliver products that meet the needs of our clients and innovate alongside the ever-changing developments in this market.

Why do you like working at The Floow?

I come from a background of insurance where although things moved fairly slowly there was constant arms race to generate new insights from data; to subdivide drivers into groups of similar chance of having an accident by using proxy data like age or postcode where the customer has no way of influencing these factors and that may not relate directly to that particular customers driving ability. This has never really seemed to be ‘fair’ to me. Why should a safe driver pay the same premium as a more dangerous thrill seeker of the same age and demographics?

Working for The Floow has given me the ability to:

• Work in a faster paced, more agile organisation

• Be curious and dive deeper into driving psychology and actions that are likely to cause accidents

• Use my actuarial skills to develop driving scores from scratch that;

• reflect these actions and do not rely on proxy factors;

• drivers can understand and react to - giving them the ability to control their insurance premium

• Leverage my consultancy skills to enable clients and, often more importantly, regulators to get bought into these scores and telematics generally

If we get this right we can have fun and improve road safety - what is not to love?

Jonathan Smith, Pricing and Underwriting Director

Jonathan has over 17 years general insurance experience having worked for two of the UK’s largest motor insurers; Aviva and Direct LineGroup. His expertise spans pricing & underwriting, data science, proposition development, change management and IT.

Previously Head of Telematics Pricing at DirectGroup Plc, Jonathan has extensive experience of launching telematics programmes and integrating insights from them into pricing and underwriting business models and processes; and in doing so driving commercial value.

As a recognised expert in the field of telematics, Jonathan has spoken at industry conferences and been called upon by the Police to provide analytical support and expert witness testimony in court.

Jonathan also holds an MA from The University of Cambridge where he studied Computer Science & General Engineering.

Jonathan, what attracted you to working in telematics?

My motivation for working in telematics is to deliver more accurate and fairer pricing to drivers around the world whilst simultaneously helping my insurance clients grow and profit from the competitive advantage that telematics can deliver. Telematics is all about using actual driving data to quantify risk; pulling apart the good drivers from the bad ones and I work with my clients to embed that knowledge into their risk and pricing models.

Internally, I work closely with our data science team to continuously improve and develop new scores. This works well with my background in Engineering, both from a technical perspective of how devices function and the impact this has on data through to the pragmatism and ability to reduce complex mechanisms and systems into smaller, more understandable elements.

What is your vision for the future of your department and/or the Insurtech space?

Telematics is about giving insurers a better view of risk to achieve competitive advantage and fairer pricing. It is becoming more mainstream and therefore the rigour and focus that it gets is much greater. As a department and a company we will continue to push ourselves to provide insight into risk that is superior to both our competitors and the existing rating factors that are used within the industry. We have a culture of building capability that will serve our clients’ needs both now and in the future and we will continue to focus on the horizon and steer the industry.

I believe that telematics is fundamental to the evolution of the insurtech space. With the proliferation of connected devices and the changes that we are seeing in mobility I believe it will form the foundation of insurer rating capability over the next decade.

Why do you like working at The Floow?

I enjoy working at the Floow because I enjoy being at the front edge of a change in the way insurers use data and manage their risk. I am very fortunate to meet clients at an early stage in the sales process and to continue working with them throughout their telematics journey with The Floow. I find it incredibly rewarding as I get to observe their success and make some new friends along the way.

To find out more about our Pricing and Actuarial capability, email info@thefloow.com.