Taylor’s Corner: 12 Most Powerful Insurance Analytics Features that I am Most Thankful For
By Taylor Hill, Business Analyst, Cloverleaf Analytics
As 2024 comes to a close, as our EVP of Sales and Marketing Michael Schwabrow recently wrote in his recap of the 2024 event season, insurers are now ready to take data analytics seriously to use AI to benefit their business and the insured. We’ve had a very active year of sharing best practices and holding training. This post will summarize the 12 major developments and features that Pyramid offers that I have focused on.
These capabilities have the potential to transform and insurer helping them bridge the gap between a mass of data and insurance intelligence.
- Bringing Insurance Data Analytics Spreadsheets to the Platform with Tabulate
Tabulate is a browser-based virtual spreadsheet – an app that is like Excel, inside Cloverleaf’s Insurance Intelligence platform allowing users to apply spreadsheet functions to live data from Pyramid-sourced queries. Rather than export data to a desktop spreadsheet application – Tabulate brings the spreadsheet inside Cloverleaf for you to manage your data.
Tabulate works on live insurance data, allows calculations from different queries and data sources with grid formatting and provides multiple query visualizations.
Output Functionality
It is embeddable, can display live data in present and web pages, and enables publishable output from publish.
Exploring Tabulate
Tabulate can be accessed from the home button by clicking the tabulate icon or by clicking on the plus sign and selecting new tabulation from the pop-up menu.
Tabulate accesses live data from existing reports in three ways. The first method imports data from existing reports in the contents folder. Just select the folder and drag and drop one or multiple reports onto the spreadsheet. The worksheet will display the up-to-date information retrieved by the query. The other two methods involve the smart reporting feature or the discover-lite feature to quickly create a simpler report to be added to the worksheet.
Setting data from existing spreadsheet files can also be imported by clicking the advanced settings icon (3rd button) in the ribbon and clicking import spreadsheet where you can select your spreadsheet file to add. CSV files can be loaded in. When importing Excel files – the actual data is imported. So, when you click on a cell you will see that there is no formula because actual data is present in the cell.
We can of course make any changes to the spreadsheet – same way as in Excel. This involves adding columns or rows, delete cells or hiding columns
- Using Chat GPT to help build Discoveries and Dashboards
The AI capabilities Pyramid offers truly shine through with the Speech to Insights feature. Using this generative BI (GenBI) tool, we can create dashboards and reports, access data insights, forecast and more within seconds. This makes exploring your data more accessible and effective to technical or non-technical users. This tool can be found by clicking the red highlight shown above.
With the click of a button, users can create an area chart comparing two different premiums categorized by their territory.
After a few seconds, discovery of the model written premium and the base written premium are shown in a stacked area chart. The GenBI tool will even notify with a message saying, “It’s all done!”
This neat feature has also been very helpful when creating dashboards this year!
Opening Present click on the Chatbot, I select the model and speak my long list of requirements I want the dashboard to show. The chatbot will take a few seconds to sort the request.
You can also use the chatbot to add further slicers, more analytics, change or remove details, and more.
- Using Smart Insights to drill down into data
The AI capabilities Pyramid offers continue to shine with the Smart Insights tool. This feature offered for discoveries and presentation, provides an AI-automated analysis of a given query and generates an output that is returned in natural language. In Discover, the Smart Insights can be used to see valuable insights about the data in your visualization. This is produced by analyzing the data in your query.
Opening a discovery, the smart insights icon can be found in the report tab shown below.
Clicking the icon, the smart insights panel appears along with an analysis of the data in the query.
The dropdown provides several options for analyzing the query. You can stick with a light and simple analysis or choose to have a more advanced analysis.
- Staying in the Know by Utilizing Subscription Services
Pyramid’s subscription services offer a great way for users to subscribe to discoveries, presentations, and publications enabling scheduled automated delivery of their selected data. In Discovery and Publish, the subscribe button can be found on the top right corner of the canvas next to the print button.
The first tab, “Details,” gives you options to name the subscription and add a message or description. The second “Schedule” tab allows for users to set an automated schedule for distribution. Initially, a drop down is shown with weekday, weekends, or biweekly schedule options. By clicking the advanced settings (red highlight) option, more sophisticated scheduling options become available. Users can schedule a subscription to run hourly (as shown below in the red highlight), daily, weekly, or monthly.
Next is the Distribution tab. The initial selected distribution options are via “Bulletin Board,” which will distribute to a list of users or groups via the Pyramid Bulletin Board, or email to selected list of users. While in the email tab, users can choose different emails to include on the subscription. Be sure to separate the emails via semicolon. The subject and message can also be set from this tab.
- The Ability to Migrate Content
Often when developing your environment, new folders or databases are created and previously created content will need to be moved. This includes reports, formulas, dashboards or publications. Instead of recreating these items for the new content, Pyramid offers several ways to conveniently move any needed in just a few clicks.
Looking below, I’m going to show several options of migrating the Agency Snapshot dashboard and the correlated reports. Select the actions panel icon (red highlight) to open the action panel and then select the data source changer icon (yellow arrow).
The data source changer panel is then displayed. This option gives users the ability to change which database/model the selected discovery is using. If you have a developed a model and want previously created reports to point to the new model, you select one or multiple discoveries to move at a single time. The ‘From’ is showing the model the report is currently using. While the ‘Target’ selection (yellow arrow) will give list of model options for the change where the report points to.
Further down the panel list, we have the migrate content icon (red highlight).
The migration wizard will allow users to copy content items and folders from one Pyramid instance to another. For example, if you have a test environment and a production environment content can be moved here.
- Adding Custom Columns to the Model
Creating custom columns allows end users to enhance the original data model with dimensions and measures without the need to physically change the database. The new row-level column calculations will be appended as new attributes or measures to an existing model. This feature really lowers the bar for end users to create self-service direct query models (no SQL required), reduces the need for technical support and/or skill (no-code interface). This can be constructed in the data model or in formulate.
Looking at the agent summary report below.
We have “Agent Type” listed – but imagine a situation where an end user is tasked to present the agent type and code within a single dimension as opposed to two separate columns.
Go into the model or formulate and go to columns à agents à add custom column.
Because we are joining two attributes to a single column – we are going to utilize the “Concat” function. Columns are joined and can be previewed below.
- Ability to Set Securities Around Content
Whether you are wanting to not overwhelm the end users or create extra security around roles within your company, Pyramid offers highly customizable security features that will help to create that extra structure around databases, models, and dimensions.
Once your user and system roles are set in the system, we can move to setting the security of any databases in the Pyramid. First select ‘Data’ from the admin panel, then click ‘Source Manager’.
From there the different sources available in the Pyramid environment can be shown. Select the desired source and then click the database. Once the database is selected, by selecting the security tab (red highlight) the read, model, and write permissions for that database for each role can be edited. This selection can be individually done with each database.
- Even more security around hierarchies, measures and members
Drilling down further into security options Pyramid has to offer, the member security feature allows admins to define security preferences for specific member elements within each hierarchy in the data model. This allows you to determine which user roles will have visibility to which element in the hierarchy of a data model.
Once you have a model selected from the ‘Source Manager’ tab, select ‘Model settings (yellow highlight).’
Once the model settings are open, select the ‘Member Security’ tab. This is where you can select member level security by role. Select the role that you want to work on (green arrow), then open the desired hierarchy (step 2) you want to configure member security.
If a role is enabled for a specified member, it will be disabled for all other members. If it is disabled for a specific member, the role remains enabled for all other members.
- Ability to Customize My Content with Dynamic Images via Illustrate
The Illustrate module can be used to build dynamic text and images that can be added to your presentation and/or publications. In illustrate, users can configure data interaction between infographics and text, and selected content items. Allowing for more visual customization beyond charts, matrix grids, or graphs.
Based on the data extracted from analytic queries, infographics can change shape, color, size or rotation. While data driven text in illustrate, allows user to show results based on natural language. This can be based on formulate templates or AI driven.
Opening Illustrate and adding an image to the canvas.
In the panel to the right (properties), we can configure its properties to connect it to a discovery if we want the image to change in runtime based on any underlying values. Users can configure the image to change by color, show or hide the image, size, rotation or volume.
- Filtering Data in Dashboards using Slicers
Slicers are used to filter visuals and data by a slicer selection. Slicers will appear in either the corresponding slide after being added to the presentation or in the Presentation Menu as a ‘hidden slicer’ during runtime. Slicers panel (red highlight) shows hidden slicer in the presentation. To filter your data further, new slicers can be added by clicking the ‘add new slicer’ icon (green highlight).
In this example, I have added in an evaluation date slicer that can be viewed on the top right of the canvas and the hidden slicer, ‘state,’ is shown in the slicer panel.
- Drill Down Capabilities in Discoveries and Dashboards
The option to dice, swap, add, or remove offers users a dynamic self-driven hierarchy model, allowing them to drill down from one hierarchy to the next as needed.
Add allows you to inject another hierarchy into the data set from the menu, without filtering or removing the current hierarchy. Swap allows you to replace the current hierarchy with another hierarchy from the menu. While Remove allows you to remove the selected hierarchy.
Here is a pie chart being utilized in the insurance analysis dashboard below.
By right clicking, I have the option to dice by another hierarchy. For example, I can add in the claim status subcode.
Further down the list, under data interactions are the options to swap, add or remove another hierarchy.
- Using Click Action to Drill Down into Data
Actions can be added to presentations to help end users get the most out of their presentation information at runtime. This feature allows users to jump to another place in the presentation (slide or content item), open a tooltip or a URL. Actions can also allow your users to run JavaScript or PQL to trigger a completely custom behavior.
This tool can be found in the Visual tab shown below.
The action panel opens and from there users can customize the title, action, trigger element and more.
Heading into what we expect to be a breakthrough year for insurers in extracting real value from data and AI, these 12 Pyramid Analytics features demonstrate why they were the first of the three main BI platforms in the industry that we worked with. From GenBI-powered insights and intelligent spreadsheet integration to robust security frameworks and dynamic visualization tools, Pyramid turns complex data landscapes into intuitive, insurance intelligence experiences.
Cloverleaf gives technical and non-technical users a more efficient means to explore data to make the right decisions to support business growth and positive relationships with the insured.
Thank you for your attending my trainings and reading my articles. I look forward to an amazing 2025 as we discover new insurance insights together in Cloverleaf.
