Data Analytics

“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine” –  Peter Sondergaard

APR offers a wide range of Data Analytics solutions.  Our mission is to use innovative techniques and our highly skilled employee resources to deliver market-leading and value-for-money solutions to our clients’ data problems.

What do we offer?

“All models are wrong, but some are useful” – George Box

Data Analytics is a notoriously difficult term for which to find a common, unambiguous definition but we take it to mean the set of techniques that allow a company to understand their data better and to use it to make intelligent business decisions.  It is the sheer size, structure and complexity of such data that makes that a potentially difficult task.   This is particularly the case for both life and non-life insurers that make up a high proportion of APR’s traditional client base.  Innovations in the insurance industry such as wearable fitness technology and car telemetry are only increasing the size and complexity of insurers’ data sets, but also the potential value contained in such data if the right techniques are applied to elicit appropriate conclusions.

Data Analytics solutions therefore include all of:

• Big Data Solutions
• Data Mining
• Predictive Modelling
• Machine Learning Techniques
• Advanced Statistical Programming and Analysis
• Data Cleansing
• Data Visualisation
• Data Management
• Process Automation

Like many of our clients, APR is relatively early into its data analytics experience but has already completed a number of successful projects in this area and we have a genuine appetite to partner clients in this developing field.  We also firmly believe we have the right skills to help our clients, as explained below.

Why use APR?

“The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession” – Sherlock Holmes

APR prides itself on its high level of training and the quality of its staff.  We provide extensive training to our staff in core areas of data manipulation and automation such as Excel, VBA and Access as well as languages such as C++, SQL and statistical languages such as R.  We are currently engaged in a programme to train our staff on the latest statistical and machine learning techniques and how to apply these to all types of data problem.

Our staff are actuaries and actuarial analysts by profession and as such are highly numerate and keen problem solvers. Skills picked up from actuarial projects are directly transferable to the area of Data Analytics and are used to develop high quality solutions.

Additionally, APR’s extensive knowledge within the insurance market allows us to tackle many problems in this area, such as large experience analyses, or to perform analyses to understand which customers are attracted to particular products or are most likely to lapse.

We have also worked with companies outside the traditional actuarial and insurance sector in managing their data.  Examples include:

• We worked with an institutional asset management research company on data cleansing, transformation into prescribed templates, and then visualising the data.  The work wasn’t highly technical but required advanced Excel skills, attention to detail to spot errors and anomalous data in the untransformed data sets, and finally knowledge of Excel charting techniques and production of dashboard reports to ensure key findings were reported in an informative and engaging manner.
• We were engaged by a multinational energy research and consulting firm to provide data analysis support.  This involved tasks such as building a model to perform annual product pricing, updating a data extract template to improve its ability to analyse bulk data and creation of price curves for a pricing remediation project.

It was the combination of the skills and abilities developed in APR’s employees and the realistic value for money pricing of our more junior actuarial analysts that meant that APR’s proposition was attractive to these clients.  Both companies have subsequently re-engaged APR on numerous occasions to help them with other data challenges they are facing.

Contact us today to understand how we can help to analyse your data.