Author: Ben

‘Big data’ is still a buzzword but if data isn’t on your radar it ought to be. In our digital world, data is key to running a successful business, especially…

A session on claims at the Canadian Reinsurance Conference held in Toronto earlier this year was a neat reminder of the technology gap between underwriting and claims. Increasingly underwriting is…

Earlier this year a major UK tour operator was ‘forcibly’ repatriating customers who had been enjoying a vacation in Kenya and cancelling all scheduled vacations to the area until 31…

We underwriters tend not to look back too much at how the outlook for the various medical conditions we deal with has changed over the years.

There is sustained interest in underwriting engines, and rightly so because they are in many ways the future of underwriting. Not entirely, for there are and will continue to be…

These days, admitting you’re a smoker is like it would have been declaring you’re gay 15 years ago. People almost recoil, wonder how you could do that and say to…

Received wisdom is that cholesterol is a significant risk factor for the development of atherosclerosis, and for coronary heart disease (CHD) in particular. Bowden and Sinatra, in their book The…

We were fortunate to attend two very good lectures on HIV/AIDS in 2013, one by Dr Daniel Zimmerman of Northwestern Mutual at the annual AHOU meeting, and the other, by…

The previous article illustrates the need to tailor the ‘underwriting mix’ to the rest of the marketing mix in order to create both an appealing customer proposition (and traditionally an…

Several of the sessions at the ICLAM meeting at the end of May 2013 in Madrid dealt with predicting cardiovascular risk. The ECG, and especially the resting trace, is a…