Cutting-Edge Datasets for Financial Service Digital Transformations

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but consumer insurance products are largely commoditized.

Customers making purchasing decisions are only really focused on two things…price, and who has funnier commercials.

Problem is, you can only lower your price so far and there are only so many NFL quarterbacks you can hire to promote your product.

So what are carriers doing to maintain an edge against their long-time competitors and the new InsurTech entrants in the space? 

Surprise! It’s all about intent data. 

Getting newer and better data into decision-making engines is nothing new as carriers are always looking for an edge. And with digital transformations accelerating at a breakneck pace, new, cutting-edge data sources are crucial for making smarter decisions and staying ahead.

Datasets such as Telematics help understand driving tendencies and road risk, Spacial Imagery helps understand property risk on a micro-level (do you have a pool or not) as well as a macro level (are you in a flood zone we didn’t know about), and Behavioral Intelligence helps understand user intent (i.e. is this a good customer or bad actor? Are they confused during the application process or just price shopping? Are they lying about being a smoker or not?). 

That last one is becoming increasingly important as carriers automate underwriting and claims and digitize their operations from end-to-end. When your relationship with your users is virtually all virtual (ha), it makes it much more difficult to truly understand their motives and intent. After all, you can no longer read and react to their body language, tone, etc. 

But what if you could?

That’s where Behavioral Intelligence comes in. Using a combination of predictive analytics and behavioral economics, ForMotiv can analyze unique behavioral patterns from user’s digital body language to predict their intent.

This “intent data” is helping drastically improve some of the most sophisticated marketing and risk decisions carriers make. 

Utilizing “Intent Data”

The first step in understanding customer behavior is actually collecting digital behavioral data.

Customers usually solve this problem in one of three ways. 1. building their own mechanism to collect limited elements of behavioral data. 2. stitching together 3rd-party solutions to try to get a complete behavioral picture. Or 3. buying a leading solution off-the-shelf.

Once you have the data the logical next step is to analyze that data to learn things like what’s normal, what’s not normal, and what are people doing that you maybe didn’t know about. 

After that, the next question is why are they doing it? This has been the focus of most analytics solutions over the past few years – a retroactive analysis of collected data to try to answer “why”. “Why” is mostly subjective, but with the help of AI and predictive analytics, it’s now possible to make sense of past customer behavior. 

Assuming a company gets comfortable with the “why”, the next step is to figure out the when. When did a customer behave this way, or more practically, how soon can we know they are doing a certain behavior.

For instance, let’s assume our retroactive data analysis tells us that if someone copies and pastes a social security number they are more likely to be a risky applicant, how early can we see that they are doing that so they can do something about it?

That’s where ForMotiv’s behavioral signaling capability comes into play. 

What is “MotivScript” and how does it help me?

“MotivScript” is a framework that allows you to programmatically put a watch/timer/Go-Pro, or what we call “Signals”, on your application to watch for certain things and then do something with it. We built a developer kit to allow you to hook into real-time signaling while users are engaging with your forms & applications. This allows you to recognize when things are happening and do something with them. 

ForMotiv’s technology allows you to tap into a gigantic amount of behavioral data, parse that information, associate it with business objectives, and write a signal with MotivScript to pull that analysis in real-time. 

Keeping in mind that companies are very conscious of speed, we create the signal on the server side so all of the supercomputing is happening in our cloud, allowing companies to maintain their light-weight front ends with no performance degradation.

In short, we give developers massive behavioral insight access and the ability to create individual Signals that allow them to say “Here are the things that matter to me – send me these specific signals.” This gives them the ability to customize what they want to see, when, how, etc. 

Similar to how companies can tap into payment processing functionality with Stripe, this tool gives clients the ability to ingest these highly predictive behavioral signals with simple logic in minutes. 

ForMotiv brings years of industry experience and massive amounts of identifiable behaviors of users as well as a history of data we’ve learned from other users using the system.

Implementing new business logic and using new tools usually comes down to time and cost. With a data collection capability that deploys quickly and scales, we help companies collect digital intent data and build alerting logic in minutes. We give you all of the benefits of a behavioral “big data” system without any of the heavy lifting. For developers, the value cannot be overstated. 

Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about Behavioral Intelligence & MotivScript and give our signaling capabilities a spin.