Interview with Meghan Anzelc, VP Predictive Analytics, Zurich North American, Speaker at 4th Annual Global Big Data Conference A Posted on : Aug 04 - 2016

We feature speakers at 4th Annual Global Big Data Conference Aug 30 - Sep 1 2016 to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Meghan Anzelc, VP Predictive Analytics, Zurich North American.

Interview with Meghan Anzelc

Tell us about yourself and your background.
I am the Predictive Analytics Program Lead for Zurich North America, which means that every predictive analytics project we do for Zurich in North America is done by my team. We have a team of over 40 data scientists and predictive modelers providing analytical solutions to business problems, focused mainly in the underwriting and claims areas of our insurance business.
I am a physicist by background and started doing analytics in insurance after I completed my PhD. I have done predictive analytics in both personal and commercial insurance and I really enjoy combining the technical and mathematical challenges with the business challenges to come up with creative solutions that help our businesses succeed in the marketplace.  

What have you been working on recently?
We have a lot of interesting analytical work going on and most of our projects are leveraging new tools, new techniques, new data and/or applying analytics to areas of our business we've never touched before - which is really exciting! We’re working to create opportunities for the predictive analytics team members to learn the new tools, techniques and data and finding ways they can help teach each other. We’re working closely with our business partners to understand their challenges and get feedback on our models so we can continue to make them more impactful to Zurich. It's a great time to be at Zurich.

Tell me about the right tool you used recently to solve customer problem?
We've learned to spend good quality time early on in the process to really understand the business problem we're trying to solve. Sometimes the right solution is a sophisticated modeling technique and other times the analytics may be very simple but the challenge is in bringing different data sources together and presenting the information in a way that is meaningful and actionable for our business partners.

What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your Upcoming "Big Data Trends In The Insurance Industry" talk ?
I always learn more from hearing about the challenges that others are facing and how they are solving those challenges, so I will be providing my perspective on the challenges I've seen and how we're working through them. There are also many different dimensions to thinking about big data trends in insurance which I hope will be helpful to the audience.

What trends you see in upcoming 6 months?
In the short term, I think the key areas of focus are around how you build capacity for managing and analyzing big data, both from the perspective of the technology and tools as well as the skills and capabilities needed. More and more there is a focus on unstructured data and we're seeing an expansion from unstructured text to other kinds of unstructured data such as image and video data.