Technology makes it easier for insurance companies to gather vast quantities of valuable consumer and market data, but many are not using it to compete more effectively.

That’s the belief of PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Matt Kuperholz, who told delegates to the Actuaries Institute seminar in Sydney last week that “about 80% of all data is unstructured”.

“If we believe in the premise that there’s value in data… then we can’t ignore that unstructured data, given that there’s so much of it,” he said.

“To be an analytically enabled competitor, which means you have a better view of risk than the insurance companies you’re competing against, you need to figure out how you’re going to use it.

Because if you don’t, somebody else is going to.”

Mr Kuperholz says data should be seen as a management resource to solve business problems or challenges – not as an end in itself.

“It’s important to be driven by real need, which is why we start the analytical process with identifying the business challenge, not the analytics challenge. Then you look at the data that’s available to address that challenge.”

The one-day seminar was themed “the changing face of general insurance”.