Experienced UI/UX designer Martin Pykett joins Percayso Inform as Head of UI/UX.
Martin has a wealth of UI/UX experience, as a senior-designer and project lead, working for agencies, corporates and more recently in his own successful enterprise. His design knowledge and flair made him a much sought-after asset in the highly competitive creative field.
“It’s an exceptional time to be joining such a forward thinking business. To be part of a great team of like-minded individuals and being integral to the development of the ground-breaking products in the Percayso pipeline, is an exciting opportunity that I cannot wait to get my teeth into.”
Martin Pykett Head of UI/UX
“It’s a genuine coup to have Martin on the Percayso team. His keen eye for detail, design savvy, understanding of our market and user experience knowledge paves the way for some exciting, dynamic output in the future.”
Steve Edmonds Marketing Director

Martin Pykett brings first-class creative talent to Percayso Inform.

Insurance providers know that understanding their customers is key when it comes to making accurate decisions about risk and pricing. They know that the best decisions are based on robust, predictive data.
The attached white paper explores the benefits and use of full and multi bureau credit data within insurance pricing.
Click on the link below to find out more.
<a href="https://www.percayso-inform.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/full-and-multi-bureau-credit-data.pdf">full and multi bureau credit data</a>

The benefits of full and multi bureau credit data within insurance pricing

As a new Insurtech it has been relatively straightforward to switch our operations and teams to a home-working scenario, we are now into our second week and it is starting to feel like business as usual.&nbsp;
Not everyone is as fortunate as us and we are very aware of our privileged&nbsp;position&nbsp;– thanks to all the frontline workers who are putting their health at risk everyday to help us all.&nbsp;
Stay safe, stay well and stay home if you are able.&nbsp;
From everyone at Percayso Inform

Its business as usual - working from home

Insurance Edge travelled to Nottingham, to meet Richard Tomlinson, MD at Percayso Inform. They’re going full throttle on data insights and analytics for insurers and brokers. Everyone in the industry knows that more data is out there than ever before – but how do you make sense of it before you quote?
IE: Tell us a bit about how&nbsp;<a href="https://www.percayso-inform.com/">Percayso Inform</a>&nbsp;got going.
RT: It kind of comes down to our founder Simon James, like me he had a background in credit reference bureau, data and analytics. It started from the idea that credit bureau information could be very useful for insurers and brokers. Simon started a company about 12 years ago called Insurance Initiatives, which identified key datasets and leveraged them, in claims, anti-fraud etc. We could see that this kind of extra data could give insurers an edge when quoting.
Then there’s the bigger question of&nbsp;how you plug that dataset of information within a quote process.&nbsp;You need to provide the data sub second at quote, so that processing of data has to be very fast, and accurate, as it pulls together the information from various sources before pricing the risk.
After Simon sold that business to LexisNexis he felt that there was more to do, new tech emerging, some exciting developments in data analytics, especially real-time and predictive data as well as GDPR and the idea that a consumer owns their data and, with consent, can allow companies to access it on their terms. Percayso is also looking at taking this layered data approach international, which means adapting to local consent and privacy laws etc.
By harnessing the very latest techniques in data science and machine learning, allied with new powerful datasets, we believe that Percayso Inform can deliver up to an eight-fold improvement in predictive capability when compared to the standard public bureau-based methods currently available to insurers and brokers.
IE: It is the case that consumers want a reward for giving up their data?
RT: I think it is only right that consumers are rewarded for allowing their data to be used – this may be in the form of an insurance discount or a just a more appropriate product but there needs to be a rebalancing of the power dynamics between consumers and the businesses that use their data…
IE: The more you know about a customer, from a variety of sources the better.&nbsp;Credit history, addresses, previous or extra vehicles owned – all these things are good to know.
RT: Yes there’s device data, vehicle history, extra driver info, technology within the car, plus you want to know a stack of stuff about the driver too of course.
IE: As the car market moves towards leasing and renting, rather than owning vehicles, you need to know more. Gap insurance, finance payments, is there a servicing plan attached too? From a broker point of view, if you get it wrong and quote incorrectly, even by a few pounds then you will lose out.
RT: Yes and it’s a poor customer experience if that happens because the broker has to then email or phone and say we made an error so it’s actually £450, not £350. You don’t want that to happen – but if you’re currently using standard public bureau data, then you’re getting a relatively limited picture and one that is often out of date.&nbsp;We would say that you need the fullest data picture all the way through the process; quote, admin, claims, renewal – because circumstances can change and as an insurer you really need to know what has changed.
Could be a job, house move, extra named driver, new mortgage and so as an insurer you really want to be aware of those landmark changes. You can only get that consistent and 360 degree view of a customer by harnessing the power of public, full and multi bureau datasets.
IE; Let’s mention mid-term adjustments, because for years these admin updates have been costing consumers from £20 to as much as £75. Can richer data processing bring those MTA costs down, or help them vanish completely, are we 80% there with automation?
RT;&nbsp;I would say we are about 90% there as regards automation.&nbsp;Insurers need to justify costs, so if you’re still doing something in a call centre manually fair enough, but if that process is totally automated, then MTA costs could well disappear.
Things like full credit bureau history, from multiple sources, is a much richer dataset and so that has a big impact on risk. One thing Percayso Inform wants to do is get people talking about consent, and how that can help them get cheaper insurance. So long as everything is fully transparent, then people will be happier with their insurers, because they’ll see better value in the proposition.
IE: Talking with Sam White at BIBA last year, we were comparing car insurance now to Build-A-Bear. Consumers can cherry pick which features they want, some PAYG cover for one person in the household, Fully Comp for another, add legal, PI cover etc. Is all this new data science tech going to allow drivers to select their levels of cover, in real time?
RT; This is what we have to an extent, individual quotes are there now. But insurers have to decide how far down the line of personalisation they want to go.
IE; So could we be approaching the end of the Fully Comp or TPF&amp;T options being the default setting? A driver could login to the car by smartphone connection and then the third party, PI, legal cover actually starts at the moment the engine is switched on?
RT: I think there’s technology that can make that happen now, but&nbsp;some insurers might feel they don’t want to be the first to offer more flexible, or complicated policies that are kind of switchable.&nbsp;The industry is price sensitive in this sector, so if you’re doing something new and then the FCA feel that you’re overcharging consumers for that Build-a-Bear policy, then that becomes a problem.
IE; Maybe everyone has to step up another two rungs on the ladder, and offer more flexibility in motor policies in one leap forward?
RT; You’ve got consumers switching every year, based on price, and you have others who want a long term relationship and are happier&nbsp;getting something tailored for them.&nbsp;It’s also possible that the richer data offers insurers and brokers a deeper understanding of the customer. Their home, life and health plan cover, gadget insurance, bikes – everything. Then add the multi-source credit bureau analysis and even open banking data on top of that and then you truly have an accurate pricing system.
IE: So anyone using Percayso is basically cross-checking, all the time?
RT; Yes, but more than that, we work with our clients to ask what are they trying to achieve? Are they trying to improve their renewal rates, cross-sell products, decrease the cancellations within the 30 days of a policy going live. We are helping them understand how machine learning can translate the raw data into something useful to them, not just in general.
IE; So an insurer could do their own A/B testing by batch? They could choose say 1000 policies from one city, or an area, and then compare the cancellation or claims ratios by postcode, age group, cars owned and so on?
RT; Absolutely. You can analyse millions of records, set your own parameters, so you can narrow down how a particular batch of records performs for your company.
IE; So analytics is a bit like Bake-Off, you can bake the cake in different ways; add layers, sprinkle your hundreds and thousands in different patterns. Bad analogy probably, but is that how it works?
RT; Yes, data analytics lets you look at millions of iterations, so you can predict the best outcomes. It’s exciting stuff – if you like data.&nbsp;What insurers want now is a partnership, where they feel that their data scientists are working with us, to get the best results from the data they already have,&nbsp;plus the new stuff that’s being added on top.
IE; Lots of insurers have heard the magic bullet solution in the past; just buy our software and it will all work better, but this gradual learning process is a better way ahead?
RT; Yes, nobody really wants to install a big bang system and then be left to get the best out of it themselves. There has to be ongoing support and it’s very much a two-way street. Automating the data is one thing, but you can’t automate insights, strategy or development, especially when it comes to new product lines.
IE; Is automation and data analytics useful when underwriting a new risk, like the e-scooter market for example? You have younger riders, might not wear a helmet, possibly had a drink, and then they take to roads in London traffic. How do you rate that risk?
RT; You start by knowing your customer, so you know you who logged in via smartphone to hire the scooter. Secondly, what are the attributes that person has? You have their device and history, maybe motor policies in the past, or a named driver elsewhere. You look at how that scooter market is expanding in UK cities and you know that some insurers will see that as an opportunity and want to get into it early.
If you take Nottingham as an example, there’s a major traffic problem now as one bridge is closed and you can see a sudden rise in e-scooters, electric bicycles and pedal bikes being used now. Mobility is definitely changing.
IE; Recently Percayso has announced a partnership with Genasys Technology. Tell us more about that.
RT; First of all, legendary T-shirts! Actually Sam White introduced us to Andre and the team at Genasys Tech and we just click in so many ways. They’re a get-things-done type of company, recently set up in the UK and they’re always talking about an insurance eco-system. They’re right about that,&nbsp;the secret to success is partnership.
So together&nbsp;Percayso and Genasys can offer people useful features, not stuff they don’t particularly need, so it is very much about the two companies working together to improve the offer for insurers, MGAs and brokers.&nbsp;Part of all this data analytics is giving insurers complete control; build a new app, website, underwrite products in real-time. The more fleet-of-foot you are as a broker, the better your company performs in the market.
We can create things called capstones for insurers, with various rules, algorithms etc. behind them. In the old days they wouldn’t change those fundamentals, but now everything is different and you need to be able to change those capstones on the fly. Not only faster, but saving a huge raft of costs in terms of product development.
IE; Rich, thank you for your time.
This interview was produced in association with Percayso Inform

Insurance Edge interview with Rich Tomlinson

How can regional brokers keep pace with data?
Percayso Inform was created three years ago by its founder Simon James, who had previously set up the first data enrichment organisation in the UK, Insurance Initiatives Ltd. Insurance Initiatives was created on the back of James noticing an opportunity within the insurance sector to harness, leverage and summarise databases in a way that is consumable for insurers and brokers. When the business was sold to LexisNexis three years ago, James felt that there was still a lot of unfinished business in the sector, according to MD of Percayso Inform Richard Tomlinson (pictured), and that there was more that he wanted to do to leverage consumers’ data and make it part of the insurance data ecosystem.
For Tomlinson, who has always worked in the sphere of data analytics and information, and who is passionate about leveraging the power of data to achieve business goals, being part of this next generation of data enrichment has been very exciting.
“There are some genuinely fascinating areas of knowledge and information,” he said, “and you find out so much about people in different places and geographies. Whether it’s about an individual person and their behaviour, or how groups of people behave in similar ways… it comes down to human behaviour and trying to predict how people work and what influences their behaviour.”
Percayso Inform is looking to new data sources, he said, to offer insurers and brokers more predictive power which in turn leads to much better outcomes with reduced claims, reduced risk, and reduced cancellations among the key benefits. Not all bureau data is the same, he said, and in order to get a 360-degree view on a customer, the insurance company needs to analyse the data of at least two or three credit bureaus plus additional data sets to understand the full risk profile of the individual.
Part of the journey for Percayso Inform, Tomlinson said, has been encouraging the consumer to input their data for their own benefit. Since GDPR came along, he said, consumers have been empowered to understand that their data does not belong to an insurance company, or to any credit bureau, but to themselves. There are personal pieces of information about the individual consumer that they should be leveraging on their own behalf, he said, and Percayso is enabling the process through which brokers and insurers can access this data – but only with the explicit consent of the consumer.
“And [the consumer] knows that by granting that access,” he said, “it will benefit them in terms of a cheaper insurance premium or a more appropriate service for their requirements.”
The growth of the data enrichment sector has been significant, Tomlinson noted, and from his discussions within the broking sector he believes that about 50% of brokers on the bigger end of the scale are utilising some form of data enrichment, and the largest are using multiple data sources in increasingly sophisticated ways. On the other end of the spectrum, smaller brokers have been slower to take up these opportunities, he said, due largely to the setup costs associated and the current lack of knowledge in this area.
“For the smaller, regional brokers who haven’t got 15 data scientists working for them, or armies of IT people,” he said, “it is harder to keep pace with all the different changes across the years. So, we have recognised that what we need to do is ‘right-size’ what we put to these brokers – we have to be flexible and not put too many barriers to entry.”
Making it easier for these brokers means not over-facing them with huge IT projects or resources or upfront costs, he said, but empathising with the position they are in and the end result that they want for their customers. Brokers can’t be experts in everything, he said – they are experts in what their core business is, not data enrichment or credit bureau data or consumer consent.
“All brokers are different,” he said, “there are some that really push the boundaries and some that are a bit more reticent and this can be dependent on historical factors such as how long the broker has been in operation or what lines of business they focus on.”
For Percayso Inform, offering the next generation of data enrichment services means doing the heavy lifting for organisations which are less familiar with the metrics involved with these services and he believes there is a real opportunity for the company to work hand in hand with these smaller brokers and to present solutions which are personalised and suitable for them.
“Handholding and guidance through that process is something we can offer them as we’re a relatively small organisation, with 22 employers, though we are growing quite rapidly,” he said. “Due to our size, we are still fleet of foot and agile and all the things that we hope will be a pleasant surprise for these businesses.”