When it comes to the insurance industry’s journey toward digitization, the small commercial market is leading the way with the ultimate goal of “zero” – as in applicants having to answer zero underwriting questions, resulting in fast, easy, friction-free quote generation.

Winning this “race to zero” requires high-quality data underwriters can be confident in. It’s not enough to generate a quote quickly using just a business name and address if the quote isn’t informed by a holistic view of the applicant’s risk profile.

Whether your underwriting data is incomplete, inaccurate, out-of-date, cobbled together from disparate sources, acquired through unreliable means, or all the above, the fact that you can’t count on your data could be costing you every day. Verisk’s own data analysis has shown that 52 percent of classifications given to small commercial insurers are inaccurate, which translates into $6.5 billion in lost BOP premiums per year.

A trustworthy data and analytics provider should be able to supply more than surface-level business information. For example, many businesses use the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) to classify businesses. Often, businesses will be classified as “e-commerce and online retailers” when they have online sales. While that’s accurate, it may not give a full picture of what these businesses do and the risks involved. E-commerce and online retailers can sell many types of products including clothing, cleaning supplies, baked goods, and firearms—each of which have different risk exposures that necessitate different premiums to ensure appropriate pricing.

Verisk’s LightSpeed^® Small Commercial platform provides the depth of information you need with its complete ecosystem of:

• High-quality firmographics, financial, and public data
• Detailed classification and risk exposure information
• Proprietary data from across Verisk’s business units
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning that turns unstructured data in text and images—drawn from social media channels through formal agreements and business websites—into concise underwriting insights.

Leveraging unstructured data often provides insights overlooked by most traditional data sources. For instance, landscapers may not report heavy equipment usage, but if a business posts pictures online of their crews standing in front of a crane, LightSpeed Small Commercial will alert the insurer to potentially account for the crane when quoting. It’s insurance-focused data on what drives coverage, premiums, and claims.

Verisk’s proprietary data helps protect LightSpeed Small Commercial users from the hazards of outdated information. Our databases are continuously updated, keeping data fresh for more than:

• 32 million business entities
• 6 million properties
• 15.9 million commercial buildings (4.4 million of which are site-verified)

When you have a source of current, accurate, comprehensive data that you can depend on, your underwriting operations can become much more precise and efficient, from more finely tuned pricing to lightning-fast quotes. Some LightSpeed Small Commercial customers have issued 35 percent more quotes with 20 percent more policies bound and 65 percent of risks straight-through processed. Their time to quote went from an average of two days to 1.5 seconds.

To learn more about how LightSpeed Small Commercial can give you more reasons to trust your data for sustainable, profitable growth, download the brochure.