Big Data Analytics in Insurance

François Laviolette

Thierry Badard

Hélène Cossette

Marie-Pier Côté

Thierry Duchesne

Christian Gagné

Richard Khoury

Luc Lamontagne

Étienne Marceau

Sehl Mellouli

The big data revolution has begun. A new kind of entrepreneurship is emerging, and businesses are moving away from solely relying on hard-won human experience to rather favor innovative data-driven approaches, which are more accurate, cost effective and robust. Their main motivation is to take advantage of the volume and great variety of newly available data (e.g., social media interactions, web traffic logs, text records, image databases, etc.). Intact Insurance, the industrial partner, is no stranger to the recent advancements in data analytics and foresees the tremendous potential that the big data paradigm has to offer to the insurance industry. This paradigm shift implies the creation of data-driven processes for important aspects of insurance businesses, such as estimating the risk, detecting frauds, simplifying subscriptions, forecasting long-term costs of sinisters, or accelerating claim processing. Any improvements on these processes will result in benefits both to the insurer and the customers, by reducing costs to both parties and improving service delivery.

A lot of research is currently devoted to the extended family of data sciences, Artificial Intelligence only being the tip of this massive iceberg. Through this Collaborative Research and Development project, Intact Insurance and the Big Data Research Center (BRDC) of Université Laval will collaborate to foster the creation of new data science technologies. Effort will be put to improve general problems of big data analytics, in the context of insurance: extraction of information from textual documents, identification of complex concepts in images, making sense of sensor data, recognizing patterns to make accurate predictions. This ambitious research project will lead to significant improvements to the business processes of Intact, while strengthening the multidisciplinary research initiatives at the BDRC and establishing the participating researchers as leader in their respective fields. Moreover, the innovations will not only help Intact establish itself as a world leader on exploiting big data in the field of insurance, but will also affect other Canadian industries and lead to improved productivity, innovation and excellence.

Collaborators: Philippe Giguère, Sylvie Daniel, Jean-François Lalonde, Marc Parizeau, Frédéric Hubert, Jean Dubé.

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