With Merkur Innovation Lab, the company Merkur Versicherung founded its own start-up within the corporation aiming to create internal framework conditions for a sustainable digital future. The focus is on the digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence (mainly machine learning) and data-driven business, which will make business processes more efficient and sales models more innovative.

As practically for all companies and industry sectors, utilization of new technologies is important also for insurance companies in order to maintain their own competitiveness. Constantly evolving customer behavior plays a central role. Customers’ needs and demands are changing rapidly. Only improving access to customer information can make it possible to keep pace with offers and develop contemporary products.

Combined spirits of innovation

Know-Center assists Merkur Versicherung in setting up its own data science department. The exchange between data and insurance experts turned out to be quite promising. By utilizing the existing and extensive amount of data, together they generated a data map to create added value for customers and for the insurance company itself. AI use cases were defined, costs and risks assessed and a roadmap was drawn up for implementation and recommendations concerning the Innovation Lab’s further development.

„We focus on people’s diversity and want to meet our customer’s needs in the best way possible. The solutions for creative insurance offers lie within the data.”

Daniela Pak-Graf, Managing Director of Merkur Innovation Lab

 

Once internal and external or publicly accessible data sources are linked, new offers and services are generated by the gained insight. An important aspect is the use of innovative methods to safely evaluate sensitive customer data. Insurance companies typically manage a lot of confidential information and must be able to disclose the underlying analysis and calculation models to the financial market supervisory authority. At Innovation Lab, however, individual customer information is never being processed but rather anonymized in accordance with GDPR. Know-Center contributes its expertise to privacy-preserving analytics and explainable AI.