Policy administration
The contract of record in insurance: what is covered, for whom, on what terms, at what premium.
01 What it holds
The data inside it
Policies, risks, cover sections, endorsements and the premium actually charged against the technical price the rating engine produced.
Policy, Risk item, Cover section, Endorsement, Premium, Party / Insured, Intermediary
02 Getting the data out
Extraction, and the keys that decide whether it joins
Vendor APIs and data hubs. Insurance data is deeply hierarchical — policy to risk to cover — and flattening it early destroys the ability to analyse by peril.
The insured party is often not resolved across policies, and the same person may be a policyholder on one and a named driver on another.
03 What goes wrong
The failures that look like success
Each of these produces a number that is plausible, reconciles to something, and is wrong. They are worth reading before the first extract, not after the first dispute.
Written premium versus earned premium
They answer different questions and are routinely confused, which makes loss ratios inconsistent between reports.
Endorsements restate history
Mid-term adjustments change cover and premium retrospectively; point-in-time views need transaction history rather than current state.
Technical price is not always stored
If the rating engine's output is not retained next to the written premium, the single most valuable margin analysis in insurance is impossible.
Party identity fragmented
Without resolution, cross-policy fraud patterns and true customer profitability both stay invisible.
04 Joins that matter
What this system is worth joining to
| Join to | What it lets you answer |
|---|---|
| Claims | the cost of the risk you wrote, by cohort and peril |
| Rating engine | written price against technical price |
| Broker systems | intermediary performance on developed losses rather than volume |
05 Metrics it feeds
The numbers that come out of it
06 Questions
Frequently asked
What should always be retained alongside the premium?
The technical price and the reason for any deviation. Without them, rate adequacy can only be assessed in aggregate, long after the business was written.
How do policy and claims data get joined?
Through a resolved party and a consistent risk identifier. Most insurers can join at policy level and struggle at party level, which is where the fraud and profitability questions live.
Connect this system without replacing it
SCIKIQ reads it in place, resolves the entities inside it and governs what the fields mean.