Risk Management

Data empowering risk management: Experts

Matthew Lerner

December 10, 2019 Reprints

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Data is empowering risk management functions and bolstering risk managers’ role as leaders, according to speakers at the Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc.’s Risktech Forum in New York on Monday.

Abundant data is allowing companies and risk managers to play a larger role in the insurance and risk management function, but technology will not replace personal connection, they said.

“The insurance companies are becoming less relevant, and the reason is that large corporations own a lot of the data that insurance companies used to own and which gave insurance companies their advantage in the past,” said Loren Nickel, director of business risk and insurance for Google Inc. in Menlo Park, California.

As a result, “Risk managers are providing greater leadership and direction in the risk and insurance ecosystem,” he said.

Laura Langone, head of insurance operations for Airbnb Inc. in San Francisco, spoke about having “a lot of data and driving our own destiny in terms of renewals.”

“We have all our data. We want to keep our data – we don’t want to give it to the insurance marketplace,” Ms. Langone said. “We want to drive our own destiny.”

Liz Walker, director of enterprise risk and global insurance for Groupon Inc., said she has become a “data nerd” over the past couple of years and is now working on a “data intense project” aimed at using language processing and artificial intelligence to ingest and analyze large amounts of input information.

Data and technology are important to risk management but do not replace the people element of the business, according to Celia Seigerman-Levit, vice president, director of risk management and insurance for Sotheby's in New York.

“Owning data is also key,” Ms. Seigerman-Levit said, but “technology is not a substitute, though, for personal connection.”