American Access Casualty Company Subscribes to On-Demand Pricing Service, Powered by Kognitio's Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS) and Quomation's PowerBatch Rating Engine

LAS VEGAS, April 12 /PRNewswire/ --  GARTNER BI SUMMIT -- Kognitio®, a leading global provider of business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing solutions, today announced that it has implemented a revolutionary new pricing service for American Access Casualty Company (AACC), a Chicago-based auto insurance company.  The DaaS-based service enables AACC's pricing analysts and senior management to analyze an integrated database comprised of US census data, internal financial data and more than 400 million historical and current automotive insurance price points from a wide range of competitive insurance companies within just seconds, and to get the insights it needs to establish and maintain a profitable and competitive advantage in existing and new markets.

The pricing service delivered to American Access is powered by Kognitio's industry-first Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS), giving AACC the ability to rapidly scale the system to meet its growing requirements on-demand.  Kognitio built the system with its WX2 in-memory analytic database at its core, complementing it with Quomation's PowerBatch technology, which allows AACC to create a varied and rich set of price data, and then match it against US census data and its own loss ratio data.   American Access can then analyze that data to obtain answers in a fraction of the time previously required in many cases, giving AACC's analysts and managers the ability to answer questions it never would have been able to ask before, because of the sheer size and complexity of the query and the lack of an integrated database to analyze.  

In the initial implementation phase, AACC reported an 8x improvement in its ability to perform data analysis, and produce quotes based on granular-level data, such as zip code, age, marital status, the age of the car and more.  The DaaS service affords AACC personnel the freedom to ask any question of the data, and the rapid response times allow AACC staff to get answers quickly to key questions such as where they rank in competitive quoting, which markets may be most or least profitable, where its competitors are most active, and more.

"Fundamentally understanding the risks we are placing, where our pricing ranks against our competitors, and how the market will respond to rate changes are the core competencies for any insurance company," said Kevin D. Rooney, American Access' chief information officer.  "The challenge, especially for a small to midsize company, is in gathering the sheer volume of data and transforming it into actionable business intelligence.  Kognitio's proof of concept and proof of value approach allowed AACC to begin this journey with minimal upfront investment costs in hardware, software, and consulting.  Kognitio's incredible team of professionals partnered with our core pricing team to prove that the WX2 engine would allow our analysts to add value through analyzing the business, and remove their burden as data gatherers.  Our ability to rapidly respond to the changing market and answer ever more complex business questions has been taken to another level. We look forward to continuing to expand this service and deliver truly innovative pricing to our customers and our agent network," Rooney added.

Kognitio's pricing service also enables insurance firms like AACC to be far more agile and comprehensive in how they handle their data.  Previously, AACC analysts were only capable of generating small amounts of insurance premium data at a time, analyzing the data in Excel, and then disposing of it.  Since Kognitio's DaaS is highly scalable, AACCs now can retain the data for use in future analyses, giving it a more complete picture of its target markets.

Kognitio's DaaS service for auto insurers incorporates the PowerBatch quote generation engine from Quomation Insurance Services.   "Kognitio has expanded the way PowerBatch provides value to our customers," said Jason Wootton, Quomation's vice president of sales and marketing.  "In a business where time-to-decision is imperative, Kognitio's innovative method delivers a distinct competitive advantage to our joint customers in how they analyze price point data in the context of their historical and projected financial performance.  We're proud to be working with Kognitio in this area."

"We saw a market with significant needs, and realized there was a distinct opportunity for us to become involved and assume a leadership role," said John K. Thompson, Kognitio's chief executive officer of North American operations.  "By combining WX2's power with the unlimited flexibility and low cost of DaaS, we have developed a service that fills a void in the automotive insurance market. American Access' management team and analytics experts quickly recognized the value and shared our vision; they have been crucial to proving that this approach is viable and provides significant value.  Quomation has been a vital partner in the formulation of the service-based solution; Quomation and AACC bring domain and operational experiences and expertise that augment and extend Kognitio's focus on analytics and high performance computing."

About Kognitio

Kognitio is an innovative, technology-rich company, providing leading-edge solutions to business problems that require the acquisition, rationalization and analysis of large or complex data.  Kognitio's award-winning WX2, a recipient of the 2009 BeyeNETWORK "Vision Award," and SearchDataManagement.com's 2008 "Product of the Year," is the industry's fastest and most scalable analytical database on the market, giving firms the ability to turn their raw data into valuable business insight fast, and empowering its customers to realize comprehensive answers to critical business questions.

Globally headquartered in Bracknell, UK, with North American headquarters in Chicago and offices in New York, Kognitio delivers competitive advantage to its clients across a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, financial services and utilities.  More information is available by phone at 312.268.5725 and at www.kognitio.com.

About Quomation

Founded by J.R. Jensen in 1999, Quomation® Insurance Services, Inc. has been a leading insurance technology developer specializing in designing products for company rating solutions, comparative rating solutions and management systems. Beginning with an initial focus on local agencies and insurance carrier solutions, Quomation has since expanded throughout the mountain west and into forty-two states. Quomation Insurance Services, Inc. was founded as the premier provider in the personal lines insurance market of rating systems, on-line application upload systems, database management software and analytical data tools. We are dedicated to offering unparalleled service and innovative, powerful software platforms with comprehensive features and capabilities designed to empower every company, agency, and CSR to increase their productivity and reach their full potential.

About American Access Casualty Company (AACC)

Since 1999, American Access Casualty Company has been providing quality non-standard private passenger auto insurance to our valued customers.  AACC started operations in the Chicago market and has consistently grown in premium year over year, having expanded into Indiana, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas. AACC focuses on respectfully delivering convenient and accessible auto insurance particularly to the Hispanic community. Now over 100 employees strong, AACC is dedicated to continuing to grow along with our agent network through great customer service and competitive pricing.  More information can be found at www.access-insurance.com, beginning May 1.

SOURCE Kognitio