Dax Craig: From Startup to Industry Shift. The Valen Analytics Story of Pioneering Predictive Insurance

No question about it, Valen Analytics was well ahead of its time for the property & casualty insurance industry.

Dax Craig co-founded Valen in 2004 and served as it’s CEO until 2017. I came on as the CMO in 2012 and took over as President in 2018, when Valen was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Insurity, a core software provider.

We understood the power of data and the need to collect a lot of it in order to build models that delivered quantifiable results. We built a data consortium where our client’s contributed granular data that was regularly updated to show results over time (from policy, claims, billing and submission records).

That allowed our models to more accurately predict the future profitability and level of risk for individual policies and the overall portfolio. We published an ROI study each year that showed our client’s achieved 2x the profitability and 3x the growth compared to the industry average in workers’ compensation insurance. Powerful stuff.

Getting to that point took some time. From pilot purgatory to change management and adoption issues, we learned how to alter our approach in the early days of predictive analytics. There are many parallels and hard-earned lessons to share for where we find ourselves with AI.

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Kirstin

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