How to Overcome Insurance Challenges with Accurate Geocoding
November 19, 2018
Traditional insurance companies have recently been disrupted by the insurtech trend. Its new business model, annual giveback, great user experience and modern technology stack are its key differentiators.
But let’s face it, regardless of your company’s size or culture, it’s all about offering a customer-centric experience and engagement. You also face the same challenge: Pricing efficiency and risk management, but the difference being, are you better at it than your competitors?
If you answer by “We geocode our customers’ policies, we know their locations and the risk they are exposed to,” it’s a great start! The address and the location of your existing and future customers are key components in risk qualification. Geocoding in insurance is no longer an option but a necessity.
Data Accuracy is Critical
Not all insurance companies geocode their policies. However, all of them will ask the customer’s address. So why would an insurance company avoid geocoding? Why would another base their decisions on inaccurate data?
Data accuracy is critical. In geocoding, this topic is divided in two main concepts: address recognition and geographic precision.
Address Recognition
Geographic Precision
Need more detailed information?
Resolving Data Accuracy with Master Location
Master Location Data (MLD) is an address point geocoding dataset developed by geocoding leader Precisely (formerly Pitney Bowes). MLD provides a better match rate because of the following factors:
- MLD delivers more address points than any other product on the market (close to 180M);
- MLD offers the most complete geographic coverage than any other product on the market
Korem has recently conducted challenging benchmark of 2MM records for a customer handling poor quality address data and who currently runs simultaneously three geocoding datasets in parallel.
- They achieved a match rate of 69.31%, with 15.84% fallback to street geocoding giving a total match rate of 85.15%;
- Korem performed the same benchmark using MLD and found 84.44% of the addresses to be known in MLD with only 9.6% fallback to street geocoding, making a total match rate of 94.4%.
In summary, MLD achieved a 15% uplift in matches to known addresses.
MLD Geographic Precision
MLD also delivers better geographic accuracy for the following reasons:
- MLD chooses the ‘golden point’ or most accurate coordinate for every address from up to 9 possible coordinates available;
- If this coordinate is one that is ‘interpolated’ or calculated, the calculation uses some advanced algorithms not generally available to customers, and more advanced than any other on the market.
To illustrate the impact of MLD’s accuracy, the entire MLD source file (180M addresses) was geocoded using the Street Interpolation technique. Then, the distance between the interpolated location and the MLD location was measured.
The results were that 57.90% of the interpolated geocodes were more than 500 feet away from the MLD locations!
Geoenrichment Enhances the Value of your Addresses
Getting faster answers with Master Location Data & the PB Key
Precisely created GeoEnrichment files, a game changer for your quick quote process! You can geoenrich your addresses with relevant proximity information to wildfire, fire protection, flood, distance to coast, earthquakes and crime, as well as property attributes and demographics, without processing any spatial analysis on your end.
Geoenrichment and MLD addresses are linked using the pbKey. This key is unique and persistent and simplifies insurers addresses handling in many ways:
- Faster response in Geoenrichment process;
- Simplify address management across multiple systems;
- Maintain history on address merging, splitting and address changing
If You Made it This Far, Here is the Best Part!
Writing an article on how accurate geocoding data can minimize risk in insurance is one thing but executing it is another. At Korem, we help insurance companies operationalize address recognition, geocode and geoenrich solutions to solve real business problems.
Earlier we asked what makes you better than your competitors? If you return the question to us, we answer by: our team of qualified geospatial experts.
If your business is ready to deep dive into geocoding, we are just a call away. Don’t forget to have your data ready!