InsurTech Ohio Spotlight with Emily Lebowitz

Emily Lebowitz is the Sales Director, Insurance Marketing Solutions at TransUnion, helping their clients acquire new policies, assess risk, assign price, underwrite, mitigate fraud and provide cyber-protection capabilities. Emily was interviewed by Andrew Daniels, Co-Founder and President at CrashBay and Founder and Managing Director at InsurTech Ohio.

Emily, tell us about your background in the data side of this industry.

“I started my career in data in the earliest days when people accessed online data using a dial-up modem, and I have been in this world ever since. At the start, I worked with data that was used for legal research. Searching through the law library was quite tedious, so this was a way to put some of that data online in a searchable format. My career evolved, and after spending a few years at home with my kids, I ended up at Progressive Insurance in acquisition marketing. Progressive was and continues to be at the forefront of using data to make informed marketing decisions, so it was a great place to learn."

What lines of insurance business use data the best? Where is there still an opportunity?

“Speaking to the marketing piece, the P&C world is ahead. They were early adopters of credit data for underwriting and eventually marketing. Non-regulated data has been used for targeting, segmentation and direct mail for decades now. However, the use of data for targeting and segmentation for online channels has evolved substantially. Whether it’s in direct mail, email marketing, marketing within paid social display or paid search, P&C has been the earliest to embrace it all.”

How is the segmenting of households helpful in understanding buying behavior?

“Today's customers are more sophisticated and complex than they have been at any other time, and that's true of consumers in general. Data plays a major role in all of that, so understanding who a customer is and the risk they represent and best matching that with a carrier's risk appetite will hopefully give the highest Return on Investment (ROI). If you're a carrier and targeting an in-market consumer who’s a good risk for a specific carrier, the chance of conversion is much higher.

To better understand today’s customers and the level of personalization they expect, it's important to start with a baseline knowledge of your in-house, first-party data because many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) records are inaccurate and incomplete. By partnering with an authoritative identity-resolution partner like TransUnion, you can cleanse, correct, deduplicate and enrich your records before you start. Beyond that, it's understanding how your current customers buy insurance and behave.

By analyzing first-party data against our proprietary segmentation framework, we can provide consumer insights that help insurers understand what segments your best customers fall into, what media channels they're consuming, where they're most likely to engage and what offerings activate them and motivate them to buy. We have over 15,000 different attributes to help businesses understand who their current, best customers are. This sort of data helps insurers make smarter decisions to ultimately improve the buying journey based on the customer holistically.

If we look at, for example, Millennials and Gen Zs, they're more likely to make impulse purchases, try new technologies and strive for higher social status while Boomers are more careful with their money. They find a brand, and they're much more likely to stick with it. They have other priorities like spending time with their family. If we think about car insurance, Millennials and Gen Zs are more likely to frequent Carvana and CarGurus, while the Silent Generation and Boomers are most likely to be on MSN Autos and KBB for example.

Our data goes much deeper. When you're targeting and segmenting, it's not just who the customer is, what their attitude and behavior is and where you're finding them. The bottom line is that carriers need to ensure strategies are segmented at the right level, sufficiently personalized and that they recognize prior customers and quotes when they return. Brands need to focus and establish a foundation that's rooted in identity, so then they can fully understand and define customers and build that full end-to-end funnel strategy.”

What's on the horizon in the insurance-data world? What should we be watching out for?

“We’re excited about cloud-native identity. It's a delivery mechanism that meets our customers where they are, as many are at various points of their cloud-adoption journey. Our identity solutions are currently available in Snowflake and AWS (Amazon Web Services) and will be available GCP (Google Cloud Platform) by the end of the year. What this allows for is a transferless use of the data. Carriers can access TransUnion’s Identity applications from the Snowflake Marketplace, which resolves identity without the data leaving the client's cloud. Transferless identity benefits the carrier in that the data is either not transferred or very minimally transferred outside of the cloud environment, which increases data privacy. TransUnion can't see the client's data, and carriers and their partners can collaborate without sharing customer data directly.”