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Glean is an experience analysis and data mining system developed by SunGard and built on leading-edge statistical modelling techniques. Its design reflects the many years of experience that our general insurance actuaries have in applying these techniques in the UK and elsewhere.
Glean drills down into the detail held in your data, freeing you from the constraints of standard reports. The results can then feed into the decisions made by key business areas, including:
- Pricing - Glean can be used to look at pricing from both the underwriting perspective (building up from component costs) and the distribution perspective (the impact of competitiveness and customer segment on volumes).
- Claims management and reserving - Glean can be used, for example, to set up rules for more accurate factor reserving, or to build models which indicate potential fraud cases.
- Sales and marketing - Glean allows you to assess the effectiveness of your sales and marketing initiatives by individual customer characteristics, and so to target future initiatives more effectively.
Glean is closely integrated into the highly successful Prophet financial modelling suite. It is therefore easily able to read the tables used in Prophet in order to calculate expected rates. It also includes Prophet's Data Conversion System to merge, validate and correct raw data from various sources (e.g. policy and claims data). This streamlines an often time-consuming part of the analysis process, and means that regular modelling or reporting exercises can be largely automated.
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Three different types of analysis can be carried out:
- Calculation of actual rates and claim ratios - an intuitive "drill down" data analysis tool is provided. This uses data cubing techniques and charts to enable you to investigate the effect of any of the factors that may affect the experience, such as rating area, age and vehicle type.
- Actual versus expected ratios - complete models of your expected experience can be set up using tables of external data. These can then be compared with the actual experience using the same powerful data analysis tool.
- Generalised Linear Modelling (GLM) - allows you to analyse your experience using sophisticated statistical techniques to determine the most significant factors affecting your experience.
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Glean Excel Reporting is a Microsoft Excel™ add-in that you can use to create:
- Data Cube Reports
- GLM Model Reports
Glean Excel Reporting provides commands and functions that enable values from Glean results files to be included in reports. It also provides Microsoft Excel™ example templates.
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Applications of Glean in the General Insurance industry include:
- Claims experience analysis and premium rating
- Conversion and retention elasticity models
- Premium benchmarking
- As part of an overall management control cycle (for example, linked to a business plan model based in Prophet)
- Developing claims fraud detection models
- Factor reserving models to enable more accurate case estimates
- Modelling response rates of target marketing campaigns
- Analysis of claims management processes
- Modelling call centre effectiveness
- Integration with Prophet
Glean has been developed as a module of Prophet (although it is a stand-alone product) and it links into the main Prophet system.
Glean links into Prophet by supplying the assumptions for use in Prophet projections. Specific Prophet applications available which particularly benefit from this link include:
- Balanced Pricing - A General Insurance projection system, at individual policy level, which incorporates claims models with price elasticity models (for conversion and renewal) to project the impact of rating decisions on both business volumes and profitability.
- Quote Engine - Prophet can be used as a live quote system. It can deal with complex rating structures, and Glean models can be implemented directly in the rating structure. An example of this is available on the Internet at www.prophetdemo.com
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Further details of Glean are available on request. For more information on Glean, or to arrange a demonstration of Glean, please contact your local SunGard account manager.
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Back to Glean overview
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