EMB in Strategic Alliance with Leading US Analytics Firm

New techniques will improve customer understanding and insurer profitability

EMB, Europe’s leading non-life actuaries, have teamed up with San Diego-based Salford Systems in a move to help EMB’s insurance clients deploy new, cutting-edge analysis techniques to understand and predict their customers’ behaviour.

EMB have become a worldwide distributor of Salford’s data-mining software products, CART, MARS, TreeNet and Random Forests. These powerful tools will be used by EMB and its clients alongside EMB’s own world-leading insurance risk analysis tool EMBLEM.

The agreement will help EMB to strengthen its customer analytics offering to the non-life insurance industry. This involves the use of actuarial techniques to develop data-driven marketing strategies, to improve marketing performance and measurability, and to better align marketing activities with corporate financial objectives.

The new analysis techniques will also be deployed within EMB’s established insurance price optimisation practice, where the understanding of complex customer buying behaviours and accurate customer segmentation are key to maximising profitability through pricing.

EMB will initially concentrate on the UK, US and Australian markets, working closely with their Sydney-based associates Quantium, who specialise in customer analytics.

“Competition is forcing insurance companies to become continually more precise and better-targeted in their approaches to customer management and differential pricing. We believe that EMB’s and Salford’s tools used in combination can enable our clients to reach new heights of technical excellence in these areas,” said EMB senior consultant Stephen Jones.

“Our products have a proven track record in other sectors and, with EMB’s specialist expertise, we believe we can make a real difference to the insurance industry,” Salford President Dan Steinberg.