In 1972, Title Pac—a part of Arrowhead Programs—began offering E&O insurance to clients at competitive prices. Since then, Title Pac has expanded its reach; they now offer coverage for crime, cyber/data breaches, and bonds in addition to their original E&O plans.
In October 2022, Bart Newsom (president, Title Pac) came seeking assistance in report automation. Arrowhead Program’s Data and Analytics team knew they could help by showing Newsom how to leverage Power BI.
We spoke recently with Newsom, as well as Daren Eiri (director of data science at Arrowhead) and Michael McCord (data visualization engineer) to learn how Power BI clarified their data into an easy-to read dashboard.
What about your reporting and analytics made you realize you weren’t seeing the whole picture that you needed?
Bart Newsom: We have a legacy in-house underwriting system that we built ourselves. As we added and pieced onto that over a 15-year period, our main data spreadsheet/table got too heavy—and we don’t need that.
We live in a very niche, siloed world. Our main product is professional liability for title insurance agents around the country. We also offer a couple of add-ons including cyber, crime and certain bonds. But over time in a legacy system? The reporting functionality we had built was great 10–12 years ago, but it’s outdated and included reports that we no longer used.
But our existing reporting wasn’t enough for our necessary calculations regarding KPIs: hit ratios, submission tracking, broker production, among other targets. We were having to extract that data manually, which is very labor intensive. That’s when we called in the Data Science & Analytics team.
We updated this process in two phases. The first phase involved bringing the old school Title Pac reports into the 21st century. Now we can clearly see that data; the access that our teammates have to the data is amazing.
Step two has taken place at the executive level. We built out the stats to see the ratio, to see submission tracking and counts and quote counts and buying counts. Then we began to build out that foundation so that now, year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter, we can see growth, and whether we’re achieving target objectives.
Ultimately, we built a new Power BI report that visually displayed a Days In and a Days To Expire column for each report. This made it easy to see which policies were going to expire in 0-14 days, 60-90 days, etc.
We were then able to create an Executive Summary report. This allowed us a high-level overview of client performance over time, highlighting the primary KPIs we look at:
- Brokers ranked by premium
- Counts of submissions, quotes, and binds year to year, along with yield and hit ratio
- The ability to gauge how each month within a year compares to the previous year, and percent of growth/decline
Was your carrier requesting additional reporting?
Bart Newsom: Yes and no. There was no formal request. But as technology evolves, carriers are more likely to ask for updates and more detailed reporting.
What goals for Power BI did the data team help you set?
Bart Newsom: Our book varies depending on the state of the marketplace. But our book is no less than 60% direct where we are the retail broker. So our gut feeling was that we have a higher hit ratio, a quicker turn on direct business than we do broker business. Let’s see if that’s true.
Some brokers are underachievers. They send submissions, but we’re really not getting from them what we need to turn quotes; therefore, we’re not binding. We need to have some hard conversations there.
And then there are other brokers from whom we’re seeing great success, but we may not even know it. We need to stoke those fires.
It wasn’t like we needed to see that we were hitting this 80% yield ratio or anything as specific as that. It was more about making the data visually appealing and intuitive.
Did your gut feelings turn out to be correct?
Bart Newsom: Not all of them. But we were generally pretty close! It’s nice to go in and just look visually and see that submissions are ahead of last year’s for this quarter or this month.
Can you explain the process in creating the reports needed in Power BI?
Michael McCord: The first step of the process is figuring out what problem the business is facing. They were having issues reporting basic needs in a timely manner.
After that we sketched out the problem within Power BI. To complete development you work with that, and eventually you get to your final product.
Then we added a few reports. We were building a report for an underwriting team, and I thought it would be helpful for them to see in real time where each policy is in the underwriting process. Then they could highlight the policies that needed attention.
We also added a report so Title Pac’s team can compare the previous year’s numbers to how they’re doing today and see if they’re improving each year. Access to data is the thing that allows for exploratory analysis.
What tools do you now have with Power BI dashboard that you didn’t have before?
Bart Newsom: An alert that tells us when we’re getting closer to a decision point than we might like, where we need the client, the policyholder to pull the trigger. Being able to see from a geographic point of view, where submissions may be coming from—that’s a completely new tool. We’re finding out where we’re the strongest—and where we need to allocate more to marketing.
Being able to dial down in the broker relationships that we have to show productivity or be able to more easily determine a high caliber broker versus a low caliber one.
For me, working with Power BI Dashboard checked a lot of boxes in terms of updating our reporting environment across the board. This process is tedious and cumbersome when done manually.