Actuaries Face an Information Boon.

Through technology, actuarial departments soon will be able to work with more data and analyze it more thoroughly and more quickly, said Gavin Blair, vice president and actuary for Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., Boston.

"There's been dramatic industry changes in the past couple years, with greater demands put on actuarial departments and information services departments to use all the information that is available," Blair said.

Blair outlined how Liberty Mutual mines its ever-increasing data to track current customers and to develop information about people who have decided not to purchase a policy with the company. "In the future more and more customer information will be available; we'll be able to purchase more," Blair said. And "our information--what we retain in our files and, most importantly today, what we have in our computers"--is an insurer's most important asset.

Sharing the podium with Gavin was Christopher Geiger, a founder and member of the management team at Tessera Enterprise Systems, Boston, a data warehouser and data miner.

Customer-relationship management provides tools that allow insurers to precisely target their most profitable customers with products best suited to them at the time they are most likely to buy and through the channel they are most likely to use. The foundation for the software is the vast amount of data that insurers and other businesses have about their customers.

"The Internet has changed business and the way we interact with our customers," Geiger said. "And there's a customer marketing frenzy out there, including the financial-services field."