St. Johns Insurance Company, an Orlando, Fla.-based homeowners carrier underwriting policies in Florida and South Carolina, has selected Milliman’s (Seattle) Pixel competitive intelligence tool for P&C, with the vendor’s proprietary market basket. Milliman describes Pixel as a web-based, interactive platform designed to give marketing executives, product managers, and actuaries a comprehensive and customized view of the market. Carriers are able to view their own data in Pixel, but they can also license Milliman’s market baskets, which include competitor premiums for hundreds of thousands of policy profiles calibrated to represent various state markets.

Replicating Milliman’s market basket approach and provide accurate competitor premiums would require an extraordinary amount of time and money, according to Reese I Bowen, president, St. Johns Insurance. “Pixel is by far the most cost effective and efficient manner to perfect product pricing in any market,” he declares.

Machine Learning Techniques

Pixel applies advanced data visualization and machine learning techniques behind the scenes in an easy-to-use tool that analyzes premiums for a given company relative to the competition, according to Milliman. Users can filter markets by geography and type of risk, and drill down into the variables that most affect their competitive position. Results are output in what the vendor describes as user-friendly datasets, charts, and maps that can easily integrate with other software. The information provided by Pixel is useful not only in setting premiums, but also in arming agents with valuable insight and in supporting the regulatory process, the vendor asserts.

“In a highly competitive market the need to price the insurance product to maintain market share and ensure a profitable profile is highly critical,” Bowen adds. “The ability to drill down to regional and territory levels for an assessment of the market’s view of price is invaluable.”