Through a university collaboration that began some six years ago, a leading jewelry insurance provider is leveraging advanced data science and artificial intelligence tools to advance its business and benefit its customers.
Jewelers Mutual Group (a registered trademark) of Neenah, Wisconsin, has embraced these technological advances with the help of data analytics researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oklahoma State University. Since 2019, the company has sponsored research collaborations with UW-Madison, led by Raj Veeramani, a professor of industrial and systems engineering and founder of the UW E-Business Consortium.
“At Jewelers Mutual, data science and AI are strategically enabling the future of our business,” says Chris Hardin, Jewelers Mutual’s Vice President of Data and Analytics. “Our collaboration with UW-Madison and Oklahoma State allows us to tap into world-class academic talent and expertise as we build new tools and capabilities to support our digital business transformation.”
One major area of focus of the ongoing collaboration is loss prevention for Jewelers Mutual’s commercial customers. By analyzing historical data on crime-related losses, safety measures and store locations, researchers are helping the company identify patterns and risk factors that can inform both underwriting and customer guidance. Armed with these insights, Jewelers Mutual can work proactively with jewelers to mitigate risks and improve outcomes.
Another project is investigating how third-party consumer data can support underwriting decisions, personalized customer experience, and product offerings that are tailored to the needs of individual policyholders.
“The fact that they have collaborated with us over the past six years, in itself, is a testament to the success,” says Veeramani, who holds joint appointments in the College of Engineering and the Wisconsin School of Business. “Our collaboration is a powerful example of how industry and academia can work together to solve complex business problems and accelerate innovation through the development and implementation of advanced data science techniques.”
Akash Deep (MS statistics ’20, PhDIE ’22), an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University’s School of Industrial Engineering and Management, is also exploring the development of a custom business credit score model to enhance Jewelers Mutual’s underwriting process and gain clearer insight into business risk profiles.
Deep began working on projects with Jewelers Mutual as a PhD student under Veeramani and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor Shiyu Zhou and has continued to do so since joining the faculty at Oklahoma State in 2022. He’s among many current and former students, including undergraduates from across the UW-Madison campus, who have contributed to the collaboration.
The academic researchers have built strong collaborations with the data science group at Jewelers Mutual, as well as the various business units who will use the end products emerging from the research.
“Typically, on all of our projects we are the experts on data, but of course the company is the expert on their business,” says Deep. “We start with just descriptive analytics to try to understand what we can through the data. We want to be treating their data properly in a way designed to optimize their business in the best way possible.”
Veeramani sees plentiful opportunities for continued collaboration to drive operational excellence and inform business directions for Jewelers Mutual.
“The pace with which technology—particularly the whole realm of artificial intelligence and machine learning—is evolving is so rapid,” says Veeramani. “There’s going to be increasingly exciting areas for us to work on going forward.”
Top photo by AS Photograpy from Pixabay