Award Applications

Versicherungskammer Bayern (VKB) is the largest public insurer in Germany, providing coverage to over 5 Mio. customers for PNC, Life and Health. In the last 2 years, VKB has invested smartly to progress on digital, especially with frugal innovation, with the main focus being improvement of customer experience.

One of the main areas for innovation is data and analytics. VKB is the only public insurer in Germany (among 11) and the only financial institution within the Sparkasse Finance Group (of over 500 institutions) to invest in this area, and is shaping up as the data-analytics service provider for the other public insurances and certain banks (Sparkassen). Also in this area, VKB has managed frugal but smart investments - multiple use-cases implemented with minimal budget.

The data platform has been built with Hadoop, and although the open source elements have been kept in place, VKB has decided to work with a licensed variation to increase flexibility and reduce complexity. The technical features of the platform are state-of-the-art, with 256 GB RAM for each of the 16 nodes built-up. The use-cases are being implemented with mostly R-Studio and Python with internal capabilities as well as external data scientists are being leveraged to bring the best-in-breed knowledge.

3 use-cases that have created interest within the insurance community are - claims forecasting, individualized online access and text-mining in German with IBM Watson.

Claims forecasting involves creating pattern recognition for possible damages to houses and buildings during an upcoming weather situation based on historical data. This is updated automatically every 6 hours based on available weather prediction. The forecasts are further used for steering claims capacity, planning resolution in advance and in some cases, informing customers pro-actively to avoid damages.

Individualized and personalized website access is being provided using recommendation engines based on a data-management platform (DMP). For this purpose VKB is collaborating with a start-up, and trying innovative approaches to provide the customer or even interested website visitors very personalized website interaction.

Text-mining with IBM Watson is already common in English, but for German this has been one of the first projects. VKB is screening incoming written communication from customers with IBM Watson to conduct sentiment analysis. This is helpful to improve and personalize communication with customers, and react to their complaints effectively. This approach has shortened the response rate to the customers.

These examples show the reach of analytics within VKB. There is a roadmap with use-cases defined from each business unit that fit the strategic vision, and have been prioritized with business cases and impact on customer experience. VKB is creating a lighthouse with analytics within its own organization, as well as within the Sparkasse Finance Group, and thereby changing the face of public finance institutions within Germany. This is the reason for VKB application as a leading innovator.

As an example of the online outreach and presence of VKB, please also find a youtube video attached that tells a summarized story of analytics within the organization -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc6NA7jG-Yc&t=4s