Trusted data and AI increase contract rates by 250%

Digital technology improves customer experience and operational excellence 

Promoting digitalization is key to achieving the goals outlined in the MS&AD Insurance Group's midterm business plan. 

“We’re investing in digital technologies to enhance the functionality of our agents to improve upon the value of the customer experience,” says Shinichiro Funabiki, representative director, president, and CEO of Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance. “This is one of the cornerstones of our digital transformation.” 

Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance believes improving customer experience and enhancing operations will allow the group to respond to changes in the business environment—and that this will result in continuous growth for the group. It's currently promoting: 

With more than 180 terabytes of data, the issue facing Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance wasn’t the amount of data involved, but that this data was contained in data silos—making it difficult for business users to access the data they needed. Harmonizing and optimizing data is crucial for digital transformation, requiring AI and advanced analytics that can automate decision-making. 

Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance chose Teradata VantageCloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the complete cloud analytics and data platform for AI, to solve these challenges. 

First steps toward integrating and harmonizing data involved: 

• Decommissioning siloed data warehouses and data marts 
• Integrating data scattered across the company 
• Aggregating data on an enterprise cloud data platform with centralized management

An integrated data platform capable of high performance at enterprise scale was required to handle workloads, data volumes, and data types coming from various users and applications. While assessing multiple cloud vendors, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance noticed that many were unable to offer expanded functionality to meet actual workload demand—meaning vendors would be unable to satisfy service-level agreements (SLAs) required by business stakeholders. Future-proofing was also essential, since digital transformation meant a dramatic increase in users, connected applications, data volumes, data types, and data sources. 

“VantageCloud on AWS is great because it provides the scalability, availability, and performance we're seeking in terms of a company-wide platform for the utilization of data,” says Funabiki. 

Advanced workload management in VantageCloud executes a large volume of complex query demands while maintaining SLAs required by each user and application—without the need to increase compute. Some cloud vendor solutions offer limited workload management, scaling cloud compute resources to meet processing demand. However, this approach often results in unexpected cost increases. With its massively parallel processing technology powering linear scalability and advanced workload functions, VantageCloud on AWS maximizes the efficient use of currently available cloud resources to deliver excellent price-performance, future expandability, and predictable costs. 

Combining people and technology 

Since Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance sees its agents as crucial distribution channels, digital transformation has the potential to revolutionize the business-to-business-to-consumer model. Insurance differs from general consumer goods—people purchase it only after considering whether it truly meets their needs and provides sufficient coverage. Advice from agents significantly affects premium income. 

Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance developed a sales support platform for its domestic agents: MS1 Brain. 

MS1 Brain features:

1. Forecasting of customer and product demand using AI 
2. Next best action (NBA) functionality, which provides suggestions on the next action an agent should take 
3. Personalized videos that explain insurance plans to customers 
4. Business management support for agents

Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance is also building a digital sales channel through which customers can purchase products like short-term travel insurance online. The company is also optimizing operations to support the latest trends in insurance products, such as insurance for digital consumer-to-consumer transactions, which have become widespread in recent years. 

The MS1 Brain sales support system for agents includes AI to predict demand. Using data integrated with VantageCloud on AWS, AI suggests the most suitable insurance products for agents to share with customers. 

“VantageCloud on AWS has allowed us to aggregate not just our own data, but also group company data, agent data, business partner data, and other data, to form a foundation for MS1 Brain,” says Funabiki. “That was a vital element of digital transformation in terms of sales activities of our agents.” 

More than 34,000 domestic agents currently use this system. Thanks to the introduction of VantageCloud on AWS and the NBA function of MS1 Brain, the rate at which policyholders add new supplemental coverage when renewing policies has increased by about 250%. 

Risk technology opens new insurance markets 

Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance is also focused on risk technology, or “ristech.” In the past, performing a risk analysis required visualizing company or individual risk, preventing accidents, and minimizing potential damage. In other words, risk analysis was limited to supporting traditional insurance products and services. With ristech, the company aims to: 

• Enhance conventional risk analyses by mixing large amounts of its data with external data obtained from client companies and other sources 
• Identify potential markets in fields not currently covered by insurance 
• Contribute to solving societal issues, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, deteriorating infrastructure, and infectious diseases