Essential data

'After finishing my master’s in statistics, I wanted to develop my data analysis skills further. Nationale-Nederlanden offered me that opportunity. An insurance company has access to huge amounts of data after all. Just look at claims data. How often has a customer submitted a claim? What damage was involved? And how much were the claims? We use all this data to make models that enable us to predict how often we can expect to receive claims and what amounts are involved. This information is essential because it enables us to set a commercial price and to compete properly in the market.'

'Around 80% of my work involves creating this type of model. We make these models using machine learning and statistics. It’s a challenge to be able to predict a certain outcome as best we can to improve processes and increase the return.'

Data driven organisation

'At Nationale-Nederlanden, we have access to more and more data. This brings new challenges with it. For example, the processing capacity of our computers has to be able to cope with the work. We also need to be in a position to connect different data in the correct way. We also need to pay close attention to data privacy. This is a complicated process. All in all, we’re heading in the direction of a data-driven organisation. For example, we’re writing more and more of our models in the R and Python programming languages.'

'I really enjoy working here. For me, it’s important to be able to make high-quality models and that’s what we do here. Anybody starting here tomorrow as a data scientist in our department, will be surrounded by models straight away. You’re thrown in at the deep end, but you get excellent support.  There are also countless opportunities to progress. If you’re interested in developing your skills further in artificial intelligence, statistics, maths and econometrics, you’ve come to the right place.'