Insurance Standard for Industrial Classification (ISIC)

A universal, detailed, relevant, current and easy-to-update list of all economic activities to enable industry-wide data consistency that enables straight through processing and accurate underwriting and reinsurance which ultimately benefits customers.

Innovation presentation

Old Mutual Insure recently launched the Insurance Standard for Industrial Classification (ISIC).

The ‘business description’ field is used by binders to capture the economic activity of the customer. It is one of the most critical data in the underwriting, as it allows an insurer to accurately classify the underwriting risk for all the vastly different businesses on its books. Examples include: Growing of avocados, Manufacture of motor vehicles, Retail sale of textiles, Pizzeria, Book publishing, etc.

However, there was a lack of uniform data standard for this field in the insurance industry and binders had to use a “free-text” or generic description (i.e. “Retailer”, “Manufacturer”, “Property owner”, etc.) to describe these economic activities. This negatively impacts the insurer’s ability to analyse portfolios and create straight through processes for profitable and sustainable underwriting.

ISIC codes are harmonised with the Statistics SA SIC Codes which means that ISIC allows for data integration with external sources. ISIC a giant leap forward for our industry – for the first time, there will be a standardised list of economic activities that the entire industry can use. Old Mutual Insure has made these data codes available to the industry free of charge.

ISIC code implementation is supported by Bryte, Santam and Hollard. Almost all third party system providers cater for standard list of Business Categories so ISIC can be easily implemented without any development work. Tial Technologies is going live with ISIC in June 2020.

Old Mutual Insure is currently developing POC for straight through underwriting processing of low risk using ISIC codes.

Uniqueness of the project

Old Mutual Insure has internally developed the ISIC over the past 12 months. ISIC contains more than 4,000 unique business descriptions which allows for SIC different levels of aggregation.

ISIC enables market trend analysis by economic sector, GDP activity, COVID-19 trends and identification of customers that are impacting and assisting them in times of crisis or need. Use of ISIC helps to quickly evaluate market or industry impact on our customers and to estimate the risk potential and create appropriate and timely responses to customers.

The Reason Behind

The Short-term Insurance industry currently does not have uniform standard classification for business descriptions, which results in additional administration effort by insurers to process it to establish surveying or reinsurance requirements. This ultimately may disadvantage clients if inappropriate rating criteria is applied.

Many previous efforts, which were focused on using the SIC by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) were not successful because the insurance industry requires lower level detail of the economic activity, which was not coded by Stats SA.

Another reason for developing ISIC is for insurance industry to be able to dynamically reflect any new economic activity (within 5 days) unlike Stats SIC, which is a major undertaking whereby new version is typically updated every 10 – 15 years.

Results

ISIC has enabled Old Mutual Insure to:

• Assist clients during Covid-19 based on ISIC economic type

• Evaluate risk per economic activity due to Covid-19

• Develop POC for straight through underwriting processes for low risk

• Use of ISIC range from operational cost savings for straight through processing, reinsurance benefits, underwriting risk improvements and improved market and segment targetting for customer acquisition and retention, with combined potential benefit of up to 5% of the business margin.