Spotlight on... Data Science

Spotlight on… Data Science

Article written by Charlotte Pearson

The Floow’s Data Science team is made up of 11 highly skilled data scientists whose expertise in maths, physics and computer sciences has seen them achieve academically up to PhD level and apply their skills across a number of industries and use cases including healthcare consultancies, clinical trials and geophysics.

The Data Science team looks after the heart of our telematics solution responsible for data analysis, which produces our world-class scoring algorithms.

We spoke to Douglas Tsui, Data Scientist, and Neil Shephard, Senior Data Scientist, to find out more about what they do, how they support our clients and what makes a good data scientist at The Floow.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

What they do

The Floow’s Data Science team are an important part of our telematics solutions spending most of their time studying and working with the telematics data that is collected from a number of devices on behalf of our clients and via their insurance propositions.

Their role within The Floow often requires them to work with a number of teams including Research & Development, Android and iOS mobile development, Platform, QA and our Business Analysts on client projects, product development and innovation activities.

This cross-team collaboration allows our data scientists to develop scores and algorithms which meet the needs of the business, the market and our clients as well as ensuring that they have sufficient amounts of data to work with and that their algorithms can scale in production through rigorous testing from our QA team before launch.

Typically, they spend their days developing new scores, performing claims regression to provide score predictivity and developing algorithms that can be used for product development activities such as crash detection and driver/passenger tagging.

Some projects that our Data Science team are currently working on include:

Working with one of our clients and using their telematics data to better understand where drivers park their cars overnight (compared to where the driver tells the insurer they intend to park it)

Improving our Smooth Driving score to give more context around the score by taking into account areas such as road type and time of day when scoring the smoothness of driving

Improve our journey tagging to better identify journeys where you are a passenger or a driver.

Revising our Fatigue score to take into account the different types of fatigue - active where you pay a lot of attention to the road such as in urban areas and passive which includes long, monotonous and repetitive journeys, such as motorway journeys.

How they support our clients

The Data Science team support our clients in a number of ways including overseeing client projects from the gathering of client requirements through to delivery, being the first contact point with knowledge of our scoring capabilities and facilitating meetings with experts across The Floow as and when required.

They keep clients informed of project progress, answer service queries, craft proposals and help to produce internal documentation such as product sheets, particularly with regards to our scoring capabilities.

By keeping in regular contact with our clients, they can help to represent the client internally through project prioritisations and by liaising with their technical colleagues to deal with issues as and when they occur in a quick and efficient manner.

They work dynamically, regularly rotating projects so everyone has the opportunity to be involved in different aspects of the work ensuring knowledge is shared across the team.

They also regularly update everyone in the team and across the company, as well as our clients, on projects and their progress through weekly catch up calls, slide decks and conference calls as well as working in a bespoke way which requires regular feedback of progress and refinement.

However, the ultimate aim for our Data Science team is to better identify risk which is why they work so closely with our insurance clients to enable them to have a better view of the risk their policyholders represent based on the unique insights our scoring algorithm provides.

These insights can be improved by training client scores against claims data providing the client with their own scoring IP which can optimally predict claims propensity and severity. This unique approach delivers three times the profitability per telematics customer versus traditional policy types.

To work in even closer collaboration with some of our clients, the team have created entirely separate data science teams to protect and ring-fence the IP that they are learning and developing for that particular client. All of this allows our clients to utilise our data science expertise in a way that will benefit them and their policyholders the most.

Photo by Hack Capital on Unsplash

Why they love working at The Floow

Speaking with Neil and Douglas, they mentioned a number of things that they particularly liked about working at The Floow including the dynamic environment, the learning and development opportunities they receive in working with clients and the opportunity to learn new programming languages and software engineering.

They also spoke about how every day at The Floow is new and challenging allowing staff to utilise their skills and develop new ones. Neil spoke about the The Floow’s team and culture as the things he loves the most, saying:“It’s the people. It’s a friendly environment.”

For Douglas, it was the opportunity to learn and be supported on that journey; “Joining The Floow was a step up and it allowed me to learn new languages as well as learning how to useLinux and GIT. What was most appealing, whenI applied for this role, was that The Floow had managed to create their own telematics solution.”

What does it take to make a good data scientist at The Floow?

To be a good data scientist at The Floow, you need to have an analytical mind to break problems down. It also helps to be inquisitive and a good team player as they rely on each other a lot, feeding off each other’s strengths in order to create the best work they can.

They may be the skills we ask for on the job description but as Neil and Douglas mentioned, it also helps if you have a good sense of humour and some capability on the ping pong table!

To find out more about our data science capabilities please contact us at info@thefloow.com.