Personal Lines Pricing Seminar 2011

May 30th, 2011

Finity’s Personal Lines Pricing Seminar was held on the 14th of April at The Mint in Sydney.  The event was well-attended, with guests ranging from analysts and managers to executives from insurers in both Australia and New Zealand.

The seminar provided attendees with insights into various pricing and monitoring techniques as well as market trends and observations.  All the presentations can now be found in the Seminars section of our publications.

Technical

  • Michael McLean and Wei Lin took the mystery out of machine learning techniques, explaining how they can be used to analyse insurance data and uncover insights not always possible with traditional methods. 
  • Our guest speaker, Charlie Pollack from Youi, warned of the pitfalls of GLMs and how these can be overcome, while Dr John Yick discussed the amount of data required to build a good model for suburb rating.

Portfolio Monitoring

  • Simon Young shared some useful techniques for separating out competitor activity from an insurer’s internet quote data, which could assist insurers in gaining greater insights into their businesses.
  • Nelson Henwood, the leader of Finity’s pricing practice, explored how insurers can benefit from using machine learning techniques to quickly identify portfolio segments exhibiting undesirable changes.

Natural Perils

  • Relevant to the recent upsurge in catastrophic weather activity, Tim Andrews explored the impact of weather cycles on the occurrence of natural perils and questioned whether insurers are pricing sufficiently for extreme weather events.  
  • Ada Lui talked about the limited internal data insurers have available for natural perils pricing and the importance of external data sources to determine geographic variations in natural perils costs.

Market trends and observations

  • Recent trends in the personal lines market where highlighted by Ian Burningham, in particular the shift in customers between the insurers and what this could mean for them in the future.
  • Jointly, Bo Wang and Jon Tindall talked through the different age rating structures used by insurers and the extent to which address rating is present in the current market
  • David Wilheim explored the online space, discussing how this, combined with the pricing strategies employed by insurers, had increased the price volatility visible to consumers.

Filled with knowledge and ideas, participants finished the day mingling over drinks and canapés.  Special thanks must go to the organisers of the event, Ada Lui and Terese McKinnon, the MC, Nelson Henwood, our guest speaker Charlie Pollack and to those who attended for their contribution on the day.

You can find copies of the presentations in the Seminars section of our publications.