Insurance is a business built on data, so why haven't all insurers taken advantage of the vast repositories of insight that lie only just out of their reach yet hidden? It's all to do with the kinks in the data itself, so here are 4 data points for business leaders to consider on a lazy Sunday afternoon:

1) Data is everywhere, right? Wrong. Data in our world is hardly anywhere and where it is, it remains predominantly unstructured making it no more valuable for analysis than the first ever human scripts that emerged 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia to record and store information. Every day, millions of events occur and billions of calls, emails, receipts, reports and correspondence change hands. Each contains data... but only tiny fractions of that data ever make it beyond the one or two people who manually handle them. To become truly useful, data must be searchable first and manipulable second.

2) Structure is key to success because it teases the tasty periwinkles of value out of the opaque shell protecting most data. Spreadsheets and pivot tables transformed finance because they turbocharged the analysis of the numbers that drive business. Each cell contains an unstructured data point, but the software of the spreadsheet allows us to interrogate and link all of those points and synthesise them into insight and knowledge.

3) If we don't find what's hidden beneath the surface, we will when it comes to bite us. In insurance, every claims manager fears the sleeper. The claim that is dormant and then wakes sometime later to wreak havoc on reserving. However, in most cases the data needed to spot a sleeper was always there. It just never achieved the structure to rise to the surface. "Collision of bicycle rider and car. Cyclist sustains damaged wrist/hand" says the structured data. But within the unstructured data of letters, the letterhead of the claimant shows he's a surgeon. Damage to the dominant hand of a top surgeon can end a career at worst or inflict six months lost earnings and expensive rehabilitation. Potential under-reserving with a bite. The right data analysis can surface this prospect almost immediately.

4) Applying structure should be quick, inexpensive and transformative but the 80% of data hidden and inaccessible at insurers belies that. 360Retrieve changes that forever. The insurance data analysis tool from 360Globalnet is not just turbocharged OCR. It is packed with insurance knowledge and analysis tools that can make business-changing differences to personal injury analysis, reserving, fraud, claims profiling, GDPR compliance, customer satisfaction and more.

Ray Davies sang 'Every day I look at the world from my window...' and businesses need to look at the world each day through the new window of joined and, at long last, structured data to get a real grasp of what's going on just under the surface... or risk facing their own Waterloo Sunset.

More information on 360Retrieve can be found here.And a more in-depth look into our unstructured data platform can be found on our video page.

Disclaimer: I work at 360Globalnet