How do you select a risk analytics platform?

Risk analytics can be like juggling flaming torches—while riding a unicycle on a tightrope. Combining data, workflows,  multiple vendors, various regulations, regional differences, and frequent changes seamlessly is highly complex. No one involved with risk analytics wants to catch the wrong end of the flaming torch.

To juggle this level of complexity requires new analytics capabilities. Risk analytics teams want to remove the technological complexity and use a solid foundation to build new risk insights. Firms will then assess available alternative cloud-native analytics platforms that could serve as a foundation for their team.

When a firm has selected its new, long-term analytics platform foundation, much is then quickly stacked, piled up, and built onto it, and the platform soon becomes business-critical. An incorrect decision, a bet on the wrong solution, and a firm can find itself back to juggling flaming torches with a platform that brings complexity back. Coping with the operational and business disruption of reversing out of a solution can cost a significant amount of time and money.

So, it is worth defining exactly what a ‘platform’ is and how can you pick the right platform to suit your firm's needs. Let's break that down.
 

What is a 'platform'?

The word ‘platform’ is widely used but what exactly is a platform?

Is it:

1. Applications serving specific functions or proprietary, single-purpose tools, or...
2. Applications with isolated data repositories that can import/export data from other sources?

The answer? None of the above…

A platform is a foundational layer of technology designed to enable extensibility, interoperability, and shared innovation. It provides a set of modular, programmable building blocks that empower not just a single team, but an entire ecosystem—your partners, and customers—to collaboratively build, integrate, and scale solutions. A platform is where many participants can develop upon the foundation.

Now five years after its introduction, Moody’s Intelligent Risk Platform™ (IRP) checks many of these boxes described above today. For example, the IRP is designed to be interoperable and to support many exposure data formats. It has modular and collaborative applications to serve underwriters, risk analysts, exposure managers, and treaty underwriters workflows.

Five years in, the IRP continues to enable innovation to be shared easily with customers as it delivers its full potential. For example, examining the IRP’s shared and unified data repository, there are many customers today with tens of terabytes (TBs) of data each. Each customer’s tenant has data that represents their customer's exposure details, policies, portfolios, treaties, modeled losses, and more. The applications available on the platform help users to think fast and get insights quickly.

However, the next phase of capabilities for the IRP will unlock real innovation with freeform analytics access to the platform. That new capability is called the ‘Risk Data Lake.’

The Risk Data Lake (RDL) provides customers with a canvas to write data-driven applications. Customers will be able to code in SQL, R, Python, and more, building their own applications to run within the platform. RDL will also deliver analytics to directly embed into IRP applications (Risk Modeler™, ExposureIQ™, UnderwriteIQ™, TreatyIQ™ ) and so on.

It would be hard for users to slice, dice, and customize their analytics data without the capabilities offered in the Risk Data Lake, and to build bespoke analytics differentiation and innovate into new risk insights.

It is also true that data lakes aren’t new, and many of our clients use them today. So what is the big difference with the Risk Data Lake? Let’s dig into that next.
 

Data Lake vs. Risk Data Lake?

Data lakes have been around for some time and have gained wide acceptance in driving powerful analytics for small and large organizations. This power comes from the flexibility built into the data lake architecture—we’ll cover these in the next few paragraphs, but it is also true that data lakes can come with some major shortcomings for those firms looking to use them for insurance risk analytics.

Data lakes from the major tech vendors (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Databricks, Snowflake, Dremio, and so on) will not be specifically tailored to risk analytics 'out of the box' as this is a specialism, and the majority of this specialized heavy lifting would be left to you.

If you choose to use these data lakes for risk analytics, the risk functions required to analyze complex risk data will need to be built and as a result, many data lake-driven analytics projects can be costly, requiring dedicated teams to support constant in-house development. Data lakes can turn into ‘data swamps’ to eventually be abandoned.

The Risk Data Lake (RDL) on the Intelligent Risk Platform is designed to offer a data lake that is specifically designed for insurance risk analytics. Imagine the full power of data lake programmability at your fingertips without being restricted to just primitive data types like integers, decimals, and strings.

Instead, the RDL builds on the existing technology available in data lakes but comes with built-in data types relevant to risk analytics like policies, portfolios, treaties, and familiar, programmable ‘risk-verbs’ that calculate ‘marginal impact’, ‘accumulation’ etc. to accelerate your risk analytics.

Unlike regular data lakes that come without any data in them, a Risk Data Lake comes with a ‘lake’ full of pristine data. Those tens of terabytes of data stored in IRP applications are all available to analyze on day one in your Risk Data Lake.

If you are picking a risk analytics platform today, it is important to ask whether your firm is committing to a ‘true’ platform that can enable shared innovation or signing up for a restricted set of applications with one specific function, a single-purpose, proprietary tool.

We will be unveiling more of the capabilities of the Risk Data Lake on the Intelligent Risk Platform at the upcoming Exceedance conference in May. I am looking forward to watching our users build their ideas on our platform and open the door to innovations for unique risk analytics insights.

See you at Exceedance in Nashville.

 

Join us at Exceedance 2025, one of the world's premier risk management conferences, on May 19-22, 2025, in Nashville, with keynotes and main stage presentations, an innovation showcase, a comprehensive breakout session program, and workshops, examining how the risk management industry can amplify risk insights.

Find out more, and benefit from Early Bird registration discounts (offer ends April 28), here.