AXA sharpens up its data act: an interview with CIO and COO Kevin Murray

AXA group CIO and COO Kevin Murray tells Sooraj Shah how the insurance giant is using data from a growing range of sources to better tailor its policies to the needs of its customers

Most IT leaders are so bogged down in day-to-day management that thinking just a few years into the future can be a challenge. But that's not the case with group CIO and chief operating officer (COO) of the UK division of French financial services giant AXA, Kevin Murray. He is working on several strategies - one of which focuses on 2015, and others that ask the question ‘Where does AXA want to be' in 2020 and even in 2030?

This, Murray admits, might sound "a little bit crazy", especially given how fast today's technology is changing, but he firmly believes a good IT leader should always have one eye on the long term while at the same time tackling more immediate challenges.

Murray, who has been group CIO and COO at AXA for the past four years, is fixated on how the company can use data to its advantage. This is one of his top priorities for the next five years. He says that the increasing amount of data that AXA has at its disposal needs to be better organised if the company is to squeeze as much value as possible from it.

"If you're a potential customer, or an AXA customer, we've got a decent customer record about you inside but we need to leverage more of the unstructured data: where you live, what social media apps you use, the good and bad things you've said about AXA online. We need to incorporate that into the UK customer profile," he says.

And there are new sources of data coming on stream all the time.

One such source is in-car telematics. A few years ago, car owners could pay for a "black box" to be installed in their car, which tracked the way they drove in order to give them a more personalised price on car insurance. Now, manufacturers like BMW and Mercedes are pre-installing the boxes into their cars, and asking drivers for their consent to pass on data to third-party insurers, Murray says.

And while there have been suggestions that this may be too "Big Brother" for many people, Murray believes that within five years, it will be the norm for consumers to give up their data in order to get a better price on their car insurance.

"People currently don't want a third party to know where they are and how they're driving, but telematics has taken off in the US. Initially, parents bought it for their kids, and if the child drove well they would get a 15 to 20 per cent discount on their insurance, with some provisions in place," he says.

"Meanwhile [US insurers] Geico and Progressive said that as long as drivers met certain data thresholds that satisfy their underwriting criteria they would let drivers turn the box off. That alleviated a lot of fears about Big Brother keeping watch on people," he adds.

AXA wants to use the data in order to move away from the current system, which Murray calls a "big underwriting pool of risk", and towards one where prices can be tailored to different people's circumstances.

And it's not just in the car insurance area that the company wants to better monetise its data. The health industry is another key focus for AXA.

Murray believes that it is only a matter of time before citizens will be happy to share health data with insurers - even via such controversial programmes as the NHS's care.data project.

So is AXA already doing this? Indeed, is it one of the organisations referred to in the NHS's recent internal "Data Release Review", which found that millions of patients' data had been sold to third parties over the past decade (http://bit.ly/1riqZnK).

"Not us, we take data privacy very seriously," Murray says.

Looking ahead again, one way that AXA might look to access health data is via wearable devices. New devices that monitor blood pressure and blood sugar levels are of particular interest to Murray, who once again suggests that access to such data would allow AXA to set fairer insurance rates.

"At the moment, people who aren't healthy pay the same as those who are healthy," he says. One way that someone could alter their insurance price could also be by proving they're really exercising, using one of a number of fitness related apps on a wearable device.

AXA has already carried out pilots of wearable devices and is looking into who it can partner with in order to offer these products to consumers. For example, Murray says that the insurer took a keen interest in Google's prototype of contact lenses that can measure blood sugar because this is the type of product that could benefit the insurer.

Telematics for the home

Home insurance is another area where the company is looking to innovate. AXA has a strategic pilot around evaluating how connected devices in the home can determine how much a householder should be charged for home insurance.

"Nest [the connected smoke alarm and thermostat technology acquired by Google] is a good example because not only is it going to monitor the home for temperature, but it will generate a lot of data, such as when you're home.

"Other in-home smart devices can tell us the condition of the roof in years to come based on energy leakage, and there are other methods of using heat sensors and graphical imagery from satellites, so there is going to be much more additional data," Murray says.

So how does AXA aim to store and analyse such an abundance of data?

One way is through a data-enrichment programme with data analytics provider LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which uses customer-scoring data and analytics to create a more detailed and accurate portrayal of individual risks. This should enable the insurer to deliver personalised quotes to the broker market.

"It used to be about storing a data record about the person - their wallet size, where they live and how many children they have. But it has gone so much further than that, so we're working with LexisNexis around real-time dynamic pricing," says Murray.

Meanwhile, AXA is just about to sign-off on a master data management (MDM) platform, which it hopes will better organise and leverage its data internally and externally.

"Today, we write SQL enquiries and we grab the data and download it onto a server and then put it into spreadsheets for analytics and BI. The MDM software gets rid of most of this by enabling access to quality data to search and download through an internal search engine to leverage customer data for product, service and distribution," says Murray.

This will give AXA an edge over its rivals, Murray says, because AXA will know who to contact to offer its services and when the best time is to do that. "It used to be about the brand being strong enough to get customers to come to you, that's no longer going to suffice," he adds.

The product comes with a Hadoop solution, which Murray says is important in terms of being able to efficiently process unstructured data, purely "because there will be so much of it".

AXA chooses CYOD

Many of AXA's employees can be in three or four locations on any given week, and so it is crucial for the company to be both flexible and mobile.

Murray says that the company currently has a "choose your own device" (CYOD) strategy rather than a BYOD strategy, which Murray believes is inherently less secure - for now, at least.

"There is currently a slight edge to securing and governing the devices that we supply, and selecting the software you need to be compliant around the mobile device usage and the data that's collected on it, but we need to get to a BYOD solution, we're not quite there yet," he says.

AXA started by issuing Apple devices, and secured them using mobile device management software from Airwatch.

The company offers numerous other devices as options, but Murray says that the use of some older Android devices had to be stopped because of security issues, while only a small group of people use Windows Phone. Apple's iPhones are the predominant smartphone at AXA.

But, according to Murray, "BlackBerry is dead". He continues: "Unless BlackBerry has something up its sleeve, I think its days are numbered."

Flexibility at the workplace has also been transformed in recent years, with employees being able to hot desk and work from home, too. The company has replaced about 80 per cent of its desktop PCs with Dell Wyse thin clients, which Murray claims has saved AXA "a ton of money".

However, it took three to four months to get the thin clients completely up to speed during the company's pilot project - it did not rush into it. "As you're looking at an image from our data centre in Switzerland there was a little bit of a lag, but we got rid of all of that with some network tweaking, throwing processing power on the virtual servers in Switzerland and allocating enough bandwidth for these devices," says Murray.

The company didn't roll out the thin clients to its 10,000 UK users until those piloting the systems said that they worked as well as any standard PC.

In another move designed to boost flexible working, AXA has updated its virtual private network (VPN). In the past, staff would be able to connect via their own Wi-Fi network at home, and then log on to the VPN. But now the company has extended the AXA network so that it can be accessed remotely.

"It means taking a VPN tunnel through your Wi-Fi and extending the AXA network. When you go home, you can see whatever the SSID is for your Wi-Fi network, but you can also see the AXA network. You can just connect to that and then you're secure with us. You can do your business work but will only be able to access certain things. Then you can switch it off and connect back to your normal Wi-Fi network when you're doing personal things," says Murray.

The company has its own internal data centre company, called AXA Tech, which provides the network, and it uses Cisco technology to extend the network to employees at home. "This is a big benefit to us, as everything is secure," says Murray.

But for Murray, the most exciting developments are in telematics - and not just in-car and in-home. Indeed, Murray believes that the evolution of personal devices won't just stop at wearables. "I think wearable devices are an interim stop point. I'm reading more and more about an inject-able chip. It sounds crazy but it's not that far-fetched," he says.

Maybe such technology will form part of AXA's strategy towards 2030 - and beg Murray to ask the question: how will inject-able chips affect the health insurance market?

@Sooraj_Shah