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Issues & Answers Special Advertising Section:
April 2021

Issues & Answers: Change Through Analytics 

Pragya Sharma, Senior Analytics Solutions Adviser at Nationwide, and Jennifer Law, Associate VP Underwriting and Operations at Nationwide, are both passionate about the role of analytics in the insurance industry and how it’s leading to better decisions at Nationwide. Following are excerpts of an interview with them.

Pragya Sharma

Pragya Sharma
Senior Analytics Solutions Adviser

Jennifer Law

Jennifer Law
Associate VP – Underwriting and Operations



Why are risk analytics important to Nationwide?

Law: Risk Analytics allow our business partners to make better informed decisions when it comes to such things as their underwriting, pricing of risk, or claims handling. At Nationwide, we are taking a holistic approach and addressing it at all levels. Our approach is connecting the underwriting, data and analytic team, claims, actuarial, all of our support teams to partner together to develop well rounded tools, taking into consideration all aspects of the underwriting risk and selection process. For example, when developing our predictive analytics tool, our underwriting and claims teams considered questions that have an impact on our risk selection, the “ingredients” while our data and pricing teams evaluated those identified factors and created “the special sauce.” Using our partner data, we can fill any gaps we have in our data repository, extrapolate likely scenarios, and validate our model. All of this is to benefit our customers with pricing accuracy, appropriate capital deployment and treatment of claims. The bottom-line goal to all of our risk analytics development is to strengthen and protect Nationwide’s capital.

Do risk analytics fold into the Nationwide culture?

Law: We are layering the understanding of data and how it can improve our decision making into our leadership and upskilling programs. This includes consuming and interpreting the data, the adoption of analytics, the design of business intelligence, and then impressing on our associates how data integrity is critical. In general, our philosophy on analytics is we design as a tool, not a rule. We are designing them to show our associates the path to make a well-informed decision, and not necessarily tell them the answer.
Sharma: It is not just about tools and analyzing data, it is also about building a culture with the right mindset around data driven solutions. In 2020, we hosted an internal data science competition, where people from different domains across the organization formed cross-functional teams to solve a business challenge. At the end of the competition, data scientists, data engineers, and partners from technology, business, and actuarial collectively came up with a fully formed deployable solution in a span of a few weeks. Also, people who had not been exposed to analytics work before expressed interest in learning more and saw the value-add in including it in their work.

What’s next for Nationwide when it comes to analytics?

Sharma: A lot of exciting things! For some of our surplus lines’ products, the data can sometimes be thin, and the quality is not always great. We are all aware of the challenges of working with old, fractured legacy systems. Firstly, we must update those systems, so that we can make the data extraction easier. Secondly, we capture a lot of data but not all of it is readily usable. Making the data consumable is key. Lastly, there are some business segments where we do not have enough volumes of data, but there is plenty of third-party data that can be leveraged to bring analytical insights for these segments. The goal is to enable informed decision-making, not just at the product level, but also at the customer level by providing insights at each step, including descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics.