Hitachi Consulting took to the stage at InsTech London’s 8th July event, InsurTech as a Service, and talked about how they are integrating with InsurTech companies to provide insurers with innovative solutions. Hitachi is the 7th largest technology group in the world, combining advanced information technology with operating technology to resolve a whole host of issues faced by societies. This includes making cities, businesses and people, interconnected and smarter, thereby transforming the way we understand risk. Serif Otterburn and Stewart Reeder represented Hitachi Consulting, one of 450 business segments making up the parent company.
Serif Otterburn, Business Development Manager and Insurance Subject Matter Expert, said, “Everything Hitachi builds, from trains to medical equipment, requires insurance. A lot of insurers use historical data to calculate risk, but Hitachi is using our expertise in IoT to assist insurers to develop newer better risk models. How do we do this? For example, every Hitachi train carries 3,500 sensors. We ingest the information from the sensors in real-time, and it means we can feed back to Hitachi Rail to say ‘this is how you can do predictive servicing’. Hitachi Consulting is leveraging machine learning and AI to form this intelligence, to make sense of the raw data, which can, in turn, be used by insurers to better their risk models.”
There are real benefits, says Hitachi, in the work they are doing with InsurTech partners and insurers. Predictive analysis and action mean insurers will see fewer claims. Customer engagement will improve, i.e. not just talking to customers at renewal, but forming an ongoing dialogue. And lastly, a greater understanding of data opens up new revenue streams for insurers, new opportunities for new products.
Stewart Reeder, FS&I Development Director – EMEA, at Hitachi Consulting, described how Hitachi is actively enabling InsurTech as a service, “We can offer an a la carte menu of InsurTechs to insurers. We integrate them, we industrialize them, we test them at scale. Insurance companies told us they love what InsurTechs are doing, but find it hard to trust small players they know little about. Hitachi Consulting wanted to solve this. We evaluate these companies with a serious onboarding process, combine them with Hitachi scale and innovation, plus enterprise services such as Google.”