The dramatic growth in the online channel has slashed administration costs and delivered speed and convenience to today's digital consumer. But the apparent anonymity of the Internet has come at a price.

Tackling fraud as it happens

In the UK insurance sector alone, each year sees $1.8 billion in detected fraud and an estimated $2.9 billion in undetected fraud. Or put another way, an annual cost of $70 per household.

Moreover, all the evidence suggests that the cost of fraud to the industry is escalating year on year rather than declining, with a significant proportion of consumers believing that misrepresenting their details is an acceptable way to reduce premiums.

CDL's response has been to look to new technologies that offer a radical departure from the past and a powerful means of tackling the problem at source.

Hummingbird ingests and searches enormous volumes of data in milliseconds, making it invaluable in the fight against fraud.

Equally significantly, it provides insurance retailers with a powerful solution for enrichment, in-depth customer insight and real-time pricing strategies.

Syndicated solution

CDL has also launched a revolutionary anti-fraud syndicate, enabling a number of major insurance brands to join forces to combat the growing challenge of people ‘gaming the system' by ‘experimenting' with quote information when trying to obtain the best insurance premium online.

In its first 30 days, the Hummingbird Syndicate processed data relating to over fifteen million motor insurance quotes provided by CDL customers to over three million customers. This revealed that many consumers experiment with factors that affect the price of their policy, with some making numerous risk detail changes across multiple quotation requests.

Syndicate members can specify actions to be taken in the event that Hummingbird detects potentially suspicious behaviour, including redirecting online customers to a contact centre, flagging cases for post-sale validation, adjusting the pricing or declining to quote altogether.

As a result, they are writing better quality business, while consumers are being protected from the risks of finding they have invalidated their policies by providing inaccurate information.

Hummingbird's ability to ingest data from an array of sources creates a range of applications for the technology, making it a powerful solution for any organisation dealing with high volume transactions.

Use cases

• Entity resolution: connecting disparate records to determine single, real-world entities

• Single customer view: using customer ID matching to provide a holistic view of all consumer transactions

• Tackling online fraud: revealing the uncommonly common to detect suspicious patterns of behaviour

• Customer profiling: redefining the concept of knowing your customer by tapping into a range of data sources, including loyalty card data, to personalise the customer journey and reward custom

• Optimising pricing: combining with real-time pricing to assess business value and adapt sales strategies accordingly, for example tailoring rates to the consumer

• Transforming the customer journey: delivering the right information in ways that are automatic, simple and fast

• Commercial insight: understanding past spending behaviour, including seasonal activity and price sensitivity, as a predictor of likely purchases

While the applications from customer to customer vary, the constants are the ability to search, analyse and visualise high volume data in relevant, powerful and instant ways.

Strength in the cloud

Hummingbird is cloud hosted with global leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide users with the ultimate resilience and scalability when handling and storing their data.

Using this latest technology, Hummingbird users are able to deploy on-demand big data analytics, expanding data clusters from one to thousands of servers in just a few minutes. Harnessing this information, they create visualisation reports and identify patterns in sub-seconds across these huge data sets.

By drawing from a range of sources, including existing in-house intelligence and third party data obtained via API calls, it becomes possible to anticipate consumer behaviour and personalise the user experience accordingly.

CDL is a top tech firm in the UK, listed in the FT Future 100. It employs around 700 people at its technology campus in Manchester, UK, and its squads deploy agile approaches to deliver high quality software in short timeframes.

Industry firsts

Specialising in technology platforms supporting high volume transactions, CDL has consistently anticipated consumer trends and developed solutions that enable businesses to capitalise on them. 

It builds elegant ecosystems which successfully deliver multi-channel propositions, integrating online, mobile, voice-activated devices and chat front-ends to meet the consumer where and when they desire.

CDL has repeatedly led the market by adapting new technologies into commercially viable solutions, from product innovation such as usage based 'pay as you go' insurance to transformation of the retail experience through concepts such as the 'virtual call centre'.

A market leader in the insurance sector, CDL's InsurTechX initiative has seen it transform the way in which consumers engage with their insurer. Through the continuous investment in the technology behind these initiatives, such as the CDL Incubator and 10% R&D Time, the firm has created a culture of blue-sky thinking, constantly focused on pursuing the next big thing.