Mining insurance data at Swiss life

Huge masses of digital data about products, customers and competitors have become available for companies in the services sector. In order to exploit its inherent (and often hidden) knowledge for improving business processes the application of data mining technology is the only way for reaching good and efficient results, as opposed to purely manual and interactive data exploration. This paper reports the first steps of a project initiated at Swiss Life for mining its data resources from the life insurance business. Based on the Data Warehouse MASY collecting all relevant data from the OLTP systems for the processing of private life insurance contracts, a Data Mining environment is set up which integrates a palette of tools for automatic data analysis, in particular machine learning approaches.