Over the past few months, we've talked to over 100 pricing and technology professionals from a range of industries. From our conversations, many pricing pain points have emerged, helping us to better understand the challenges businesses face and inform the direction of our platform.
To date, we've primarily focused on insurance, speaking with pricing analysts through to C-suite executives at startups up to publicly listed companies. We've covered personal and commercial lines across property and casualty, life and health, and reinsurance. Outside of insurance, we've spoken to consumer and commercial lenders, and have had inbound interest from other industries.
Any business looking to provide dynamic and personalised pricing to their customers is of interest to us, and we're keen to continue learning from pricing and technology professionals in any industry.
Whilst most business face their own unique challenges, there are consistencies in the pain points they feel in current processes. We've grouped these into several areas:
Data Quality and Cleaning: Insurance companies deal with vast amounts of data, and ensuring its quality is essential. Data cleaning involves identifying and rectifying inaccuracies, missing values, and inconsistencies in datasets. This process can be time-consuming and requires significant effort.
Data Integration: Insurance companies often need to integrate data from various sources, such as brokers, aggregators, and internal systems. Differences in data formats and structures across these sources can pose integration challenges.
Duplication and Versioning: Duplicated quotes or multiple versions of data can create confusion and lead to errors. It's essential to maintain version control and manage duplicate data effectively.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Pricing decisions often involve multiple teams, including actuaries, data scientists, underwriters, and IT professionals. Effective communication and collaboration between these teams are crucial for successful pricing strategies.
Approval Processes: The need for approvals from different stakeholders, both internal and external, can introduce delays in implementing pricing changes. Streamlining approval workflows is essential to reduce bottlenecks.
Documentation and Transparency: Lack of clear documentation and transparency in decision-making processes can make it challenging to track and understand pricing changes over time. Having a centralized repository for documentation can address this issue.
Manual Testing: Many organizations rely on manual testing processes, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. Automating testing procedures can help reduce the time and effort required.
Version Control: Maintaining version control for pricing models and data is crucial for auditing and tracking changes. Inconsistent versioning can lead to confusion and errors.
Impact Analysis: Understanding the impact of pricing changes before deployment is essential. Without proper impact analysis tools and processes, organizations may struggle to predict how changes will affect profitability.
Legacy Systems: The presence of legacy systems can hinder innovation and agility. Integrating modern technology solutions and updating legacy systems is often a complex and resource-intensive task.
IT Dependency: Relying heavily on IT teams for implementing pricing changes can lead to delays, especially when IT teams are already burdened with other responsibilities.
Data Enrichment: Adding new data sources or factors to pricing models can be challenging, especially when IT resources are required to implement these changes.
Regulatory Approval: Insurance pricing is subject to regulatory oversight, and obtaining approval for pricing changes can be a lengthy process. Ensuring that pricing strategies comply with industry regulations is essential but can slow down innovation.
Alignment with Standards: Insurance companies must align their pricing models with industry standards and best practices. Adhering to these standards while innovating can be a delicate balance.
Auditability: Maintaining an audit trail for pricing changes is crucial for regulatory compliance. Lacking a robust audit trail can lead to compliance issues and difficulties in addressing regulatory inquiries.
The more we speak to pricing professionals, the more we realise that they share many similar problems when it comes to 4 key areas: Data, Process, Testing and Publishing. We are focusing on solving these problems with the first version of our platform.
That said, we remain committed to learning about the problems pricing professionals face in order to build the best solution possible for this critical function in modern businesses.
If you’re interested to see a demo of the Swallow platform, or share your burning pricing challenges, we’d love to chat, please feel free to reach out via the form or on contact@llow.io.
