Forward-thinking financial services organizations are increasingly using sophisticated tools to upgrade the end customer experience at various points in the customer journey.  Banks and insurers have focused most often on lifecycle touchpoints such as new customer acquisition, account remediation, and promoting add-on products and services.  In order to capture the full business value of their efforts, financial services firms need to take a more holistic view of transformation. They need to ensure that they are covering the entire customer lifecycle, and that the effort encompasses ..read more

Even though we’re now more than two years removed from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and are currently facing a variety of new global challenges including inflation and changing weather conditions to name a few, most insurance companies continue to face many challenges related to their operations and processes.   Clearly, insurers had a lot to manage … and had to react to it all at the same time. Supply chain disruptions. Remote workers. Challenging regulations. Customers’ changing patterns of behavior and expectations.   With so much change – literally overnight – in ..read more

Inflation has proven one of the most difficult economic parameters to predict. Nearly two full business generations have elapsed without inflation being a dominant topic of conversation, as it was earlier, driven by two major 20th-century wars and the oil shocks of the 1970’s:  As seen in the chart, since the mid-1980’s, inflation in the United States has remained within a relatively narrow band, predictable and tame enough to allow business forecasting and operations to focus on other planning parameters.   That has all changed in just a few short months.  Today’s Price P ..read more

Like all segments of the banking industry, automotive lending software  is in the midst of tremendous change, driven not just by the effects of the COVID-19 market shock, but also from structural changes in the market such as online car buying, and resulting changes in dealer behavior.  At the recent Earnix Excelerate Summit, Earnix spoke with Ryan Potts, Director of Pricing & Profitability, Dealer Services at U.S. Bank. A 14-year veteran of U.S. Bank, Ryan leads the consumer dealer services division, and he and his team are responsible for pricing and profitability for auto loan ..read more

For many financial services customers, there is little differentiation between rival banks and their products and services. In these consumers’ view, financial products are truly commodities, and with those products widely available from traditional banks, neo-banks and non-bank sources, competition can devolve into nothing but price comparisons, causing a “race to the bottom” in acquiring and retaining customers.  At the recent Earnix Excellerate Summit, we spoke with Dan Latimore, Chief Research Officer at Celent. Dan and his team deliver insightful research and consulting services on t ..read more

“Banks haven’t always been enthusiastic about working with small businesses. These enterprises are small in scale, loan values tend to be low and the failure rate is comparatively high, so for many bankers, they didn’t seem worth the trouble.” That assessment, by Terry Badger, CFA, managing editor of the non-profit Bank Administration Institute (BAI) summarizes the conundrum bankers face in deciding how to approach the small and medium enterprise (SME) or small and medium business (SMB) market. Or not. In its recently-published Executive Report on the segment, BAI catalogs the reasons lender ..read more

While personalized insurance is not a new concept, many insurance companies still haven’t officially launched their first personalization program.  In many ways this is understandable. First, many insurers may be intimidated by the various technology buzzwords that seem to be required: machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and more. Most insurance companies tend to rely on traditional technologies and may not be fast adopters of new innovations. As a result, they may believe they don’t have the right technology in place or there are too many barriers to ..read more

In the first blog article of our end-to-end pricing and rating series, we highlighted the benefits that a true end-to-end platform can deliver and described the many challenges caused by disparate, siloed pricing and rating engines.   In that article, we described some of the game-changing technologies and capabilities that are now available in the most innovative pricing and rating platforms. Some of these are just emerging and becoming mainstream now, so not every insurance company is fully aware of their total value—and how they can contribute to the company’s ..read more

Many insurance companies are currently grappling with a new type of data: Behavioral telematics data. After ades of estimating risk using “classical” variables, such as age or vehicle type, actuaries and analysts suddenly have to deal with highly detailed data about driving habits, that comes in different degrees of resolution and might be difficult to process and analyze. It’s a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. To best respond, many insurance companies rely on telematics suppliers or develop themselves, a single “telematics-based driving score” that aggregates the highly detaile ..read more

Earnix Makes it Easy to be FCA-Compliant and Reward Loyal Customers The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) aims to tackle ‘Price walking’ by implementing new rules to protect consumers from loyalty penalties related to various insurance products. These new rules, which were announced in May 2021, will become official at the start of 2022.   What do the new ‘Price walking’ regulations mean for insurance companies, and ultimately, the end customer?   These updates are likely to change the insurance industry as firms will now have to offer renewal ..read more