Do the people involved in pricing have the right range of skills? Are they incentivised and rewarded appropriately? Are they organised effectively? Are senior managers giving an effective lead to improving pricing decisions?,/br> We would expect the Leadership of an insurer to :

• Create the plan towards pricing excellence
• Create and encourage the pricing champion roles
• Set and review quantifiable objectives and constraints for pricing decisions to reflect business goals and strategy

The organisation should include :

• A Business Team (underwriters, marketing, sales) led by Business/P&L Manager accountable for achieving objectives, setting prices, and assessing performance
• An Analysis team to provide day-to-day support on generating options, predicting their impact, assessing performance, developing pricing methodologies, and assuring the quality of the management information. To deliver this the team needs a balance of skills covering data preparation and extraction, exploratory data analysis, and model building.

The skills we would expect to be available include :

• Analysis team : an appreciation of the business and its objectives plus the right range of technical analytical and model building skills
• Business team (marketing, underwriting, sales) :a strong understanding of the market, customers and competitors plus sufficient analytical skills to use tools provide by analysts
• Data : knowledge of the source data, skills in data extraction and transformation, skills in constructing and using multidimensional data
• Modelling : skills in building and testing statistical predictive models