Modern Insurance Magazine sits with Stuart Goldsmith, Senior Product Manager, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Insurance, U.K. and Ireland, for a chat about the insurance industry.

Tell us about your role at your firm. What do you do, and what do you find most interesting about it?

I am responsible for commercial and technical management of strategic LexisNexis Risk Solutions insurance data solutions. This includes the contributory data product LexisNexis® Policy Insights, which offers a market-wide view of a customer’s motor policy history; and LexID® for Insurance, which uses proprietary linking technology to resolve, manage and match information to create one consolidated view of the customer which is then assigned a unique LexID.

This pair of flagship products support accurate pricing, underwriting and counter-fraud decisions in real-time and I am very much involved in promoting these products at insurance industry events; hosting client forums and educating our clients on how to get the most out of these solutions.

I also propose and manage the implementation of projects to improve performance and revenue opportunities for our existing products, such as helping make our data solutions available from a new software distribution platform for the insurance broker market.

As a large part of my role is looking after contributory data from our customers, I am a member of the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Global Contributory project team, which collaborates on new product ideas and share best practice from across the organisation.

The design, development and launch of new products also comes under my remit, leading multi-functional teams including members from Sales, Technology, Analytics, Delivery, Legal, and Marketing.

As you can tell, my job is hugely varied. I really enjoy sitting down with clients to help them maximise the benefits of our solutions and just as importantly, listen to their business dilemmas so that we can consider how data could answer those challenges.

What are the challenges facing your business right now, and how are you working to overcome them?

Our customers’ challenges are our challenges, so right now we are supporting our insurance customers as they adapt to the new pricing regulations.

Insurance providers now need to know their existing customer to a far greater degree so that they can deliver fair pricing and fair outcomes to those customers at new business and renewal. They need a single customer view based on all the previous touchpoints and history the brand or brands has had with that customer.

The trick has been in bringing this data together but for most insurance providers, the task of linking customer records is much easier said than done due to the complexity of matching records where an address or name may have changed.

LexID for Insurance finds common threads across customer records by pulling on a wide range of data sets, comprising circa 2.6bn records processed by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, including public records and insurance policy history data, to help build the picture of all UK individuals to support all parts of the policy lifecycle, from marketing through to claim.

By pulling together data from multiple touch points, insurance providers can build a comprehensive and accurate representation of a customer’s history, at whatever point they are in their dealings with the brand. It also means they can utilise a consistent methodology for standardisation and matching of customer data across multiple databases.

Perhaps most importantly, it can help determine that the right product is being offered for the risk presented at renewal, and at the right price.

If you could go back to the start of your professional career, what piece of advice would you give to yourself?

Remember to look beyond your immediate working environment for added inspiration. Taking the step into risk data was a step into the unknown for me at the time but has proved a revelation.

What would be your prediction for the industry in 2022 and beyond?

All eyes are on the impact of the pricing regulations but from our perspective, the industry is facing a host of different challenges and changes in risk – from extreme weather to hybrid working and more technically advanced vehicles. It will become all the more important for insurance providers to use data to understand and segment their customers to deliver more personalised products and pricing to fit the risk.

What made you want to work in this industry?

I have always loved working in data, and the way in which it can transform people’s lives for the better – my career started in marketing data for utilities, charities and financial services. The transition to insurance started with my first role with LexisNexis Risk Solutions. The factors for assessing insurance risk to make fair and informed decisions for customers are growing every year, and I enjoy the pace and dynamism of the market and the appetite within our insurance customers for greater insights to do more for their customers. This has become all the more important as we emerge from the pandemic and face some tough economic challenges.

Thus far, what has been your most significant or proudest achievement in your current or previous roles?

I am particularly proud that today our No Claims Discount contributory database is being contributed to and used by 99% of the U.K. motor insurance market – in fact the number of contributors more than doubled in size under my management. This has had such an important role in cutting time and paper waste and improving the quote process for customers.

That same contributory database became the foundation for Policy Insights, which brought a completely new source of intelligence into the UK motor market, helping to better predict the risk of claim and early cancellation. It is a privilege to lead the effort to bring and continue to expand these transformative services to the UK motor insurance market.

How would you like to see the insurance industry improved next year / 5 years / by the time you retire?

I think there’s a real opportunity for the sector to do more with the data it already holds on customers.  Consumers become frustrated when they don’t feel understood. For insurance customers – it could be at quote, mid-term adjustment or at claim – they expect and deserve a service that is cognisant of any past contact or relationship they have had with the brand.  For example, if a customer is applying for a motor insurance quote, the insurance provider should know that the same customer had home insurance with them 3 years previously or that there was a claim against their travel insurance policy in the past year.

The single customer view has been fraught with difficulties to date due to the merger and acquisition activity in the market and customer data being held in different silos in separate tech stacks and parts of the business. However, the technology now exists to link and match this data. Customer Data Management should no longer be a hurdle for insurance firms holding vast amounts of customer data that is underutilised and at risk of becoming outdated. In the next year, I would hope to see a real step-change in the way insurance firms leverage the data they hold within their own four walls.

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