Close Brothers Premium Finance (CBPF) has launched a new suite of data insight and enrichment tools for its 1,600 partner brokers.
Seán Kemple, managing director, Premium, said the digital tools, branded Foresight for PL brokers and Focus 360 for commercial lines, will be available to CBPF partners.
He explained that Focus 360 gives commercial lines brokers a retrospective view of premium finance data, providing learnings from historical performance to help them make better business decisions in the present day. It has been developed as an interactive dashboard in partnership with Tableau, an interactive data visualization software company, to give brokers advanced metrics, KPIs and peer benchmarking.
He said: “With Focus 360, brokers can analyse payment delays and/or commission by policy type. They can see the gap between policy renewal and loading of loan, brokers can benchmark themselves to improve competitiveness; Also, Focus 360 can provide better understanding of a brokers’ penetration by sector, and enhance understanding of the relationship between costs and retention ratios.”
DEEPER INSIGHTS
Turning to Foresight Scores, Seán said it has been built using CBPF’s own customer outcome data, but is being supplemented by data from a leading UK price comparison website (PCW), and developed with the help of CDL Foresight Scores are machine learning models, updated monthly, that dynamically predict consumer behaviour, and scores new car insurance customers at point of quote.
Seán said: “The Foresight Scores are a first for the premium finance sector and allows PL brokers, especially high volume brokers that use PCWs, to predict who is likely to cancel mid-term and pay annually or monthly. Retro analysis has proven that for a broker who used an existing cancellation model the Foresight cancellation score added an additional 10% improvement in accuracy in predicting future cancellations, a crucial advantage for brokers in the highly competitive motor market.”
Both tools will be available for brokers to demo at the forthcoming BIBA conference.
Seán said: “Both these tools aim to improve our partners’ effectiveness and maximise their premium finance income.”
“I believe CBPF have built a leading reputation for data science in premium finance during the last six years, and Focus 360 and Foresight are the next steps in our ongoing focus on digital technology to help our partners grow their business. These are major investments from CBPF in digital insight that underlines our ongoing commitment to our broking partners and our determination to provide the best possible digital tools in the market.”
DEVELOPMENT
Foresight was developed with technology partner CDL, whose CEO, Nigel Phillips said: “We are delighted to be supporting Close Brothers to launch this new enrichment service and offer consumers a more personalised finance proposition. It adds an innovative dimension to the customer journey and we are building integrations with other software providers to ensure full market coverage for brokers who use aggregators.
Sean explained that brokers already using CDL, will access Foresight through their existing CDL platform. “It’s easy to integrate into the ratings engine and is an easy switch on there’s no bespoke build. For non CDL users, CBPF will arrange access via an API which will enable brokers to link it their ratings engine.
Seán added: “Premium finance is a vital part of a brokers’ customer proposition, and during the current economic volatility we are also seeing increased demand from customers to spread the cost of their insurance.”
We can now offer partners the opportunity for the first time to interrogate their finance book in detail and make more informed decisions; with better understanding comes improved customer service and enhanced profitability.”
“When I joined CBPF as MD last year, I said at the time that we intended to significantly increase our investment in digital technology for our partners, and this is the first and major tranche of a number of enhancements we plan to make during the next phase.”
“I am confident both Focus 360 and Foresight will quickly become a major differentiator for us, and give our partners the means to further improve the contribution premium finance makes to their bottom lines.”
Be the first to comment