What Does a Director of Analytics & Underwriting Do?
Partner
Every broker likes to hype up their data capabilities. It’s easy to point to piles of reports with visually appealing graphics and tell a business leader that you’re on the forefront of analytics technology. It’s simple, even, to make an argument that constant updates on a business’ data qualify as being a good steward of that information.
But the biggest question we found our clients asking before they made the switch to M3 was, “What does any of this data mean? What can we actually do with the data?”
It’s one thing to say you have data analytics and underwriting capabilities, and quite another to use that data to help your clients impact change. That’s where our director of analytics & underwriting comes in.
What does a director of analytics & underwriting do?
Brian Meyer is M3’s director of analytics & underwriting, joining our team first in 2014 and over time creating a niche for himself as the guy who can not only approach data with an analytical mind, but also explain that data and affect true change for our clients.
Brian calls this approach “Dataffect”, a consultative approach to data that combines predictive analytics with deployable experts to drive your employee benefits strategy.
In this way, he’s different than your average director of data at an insurance broker. While others can claim data expertise, they often don’t combine it with the ability to get in front of a business leader and really break down the information in simplified terms, but also highlight the key aspects of the data that you, the client, can act on at that moment to affect your employees’ health and wellbeing, as well as your healthcare costs.
You could say that it’s M3’s classic mix of world class expertise and individual attention – we’ll leave that up to you to decide.
What can clients expect when working with M3’s director of analytics & underwriting?
M3 is uniquely set up to ensure that all our clients can rely on their account executives to bring a strategy to the table that utilizes the data at their disposal to drive the success of your employee benefits strategy. This is due to our franchise model, wherein each account executive has direct access to Brian Meyer as M3’s director of analytics & underwriting.
We guarantee internal access to world class resources like Brian because, frankly, we don’t believe that a strategy is sound without the data to back it up.
The analytics work that your account executives bring to the table has often been consulted on by Brian and his team, but there is also the opportunity for our clients to meet with Brian directly.
At key times throughout the year (strategy sessions, renewal discussions, etc.) M3 account executives may bring Brian to the table to provide market insight from a local and national perspective and pair that with his knowledge of your organization’s individual data to build a strategy that helps you achieve your goals. Brian can assist with large-scale analyses that provide retrospective views on your data or predictive views to help you make decisions for future opportunities.
Doing data differently
Every session where M3 account executives provide an opportunity for their clients to interact with their data is structured with this in mind: how does the data that we are presenting provide an opportunity to affect strategy and help our clients achieve their goals?
We believe that the presentation of data without the opportunity for action has little to no value for an organization. Brian, M3’s director of analytics & underwriting, pushes our team to apply this perspective to every one of their strategic sessions.
As a client, you won’t receive a litany of reports as a way for your broker to “check the box” on data. We know that in order to help you truly take action, we need to do data differently.
This approach is just one example of the world-class resources and individual attention that we provide to our clients. Contact your M3 account executive to talk through how data is being used to affect your employee benefits strategy.
