Media Information

Köln/Düsseldorf, 5. Dezember 2019. The management and technology consultancy Detecon has received an award in the renowned “Best of Consulting” competition organized annually by Wirtschaftswoche. A Detecon project team was honored with the ranking “Award-Winning” in the category “Marketing & Organization,” Focus “Analytics.” Project manager Dr. Igor Schnakenburg, Elena Fomenko, and Steffen Kuhn, head of the associated Detecon Digital Engineering Center, as well as Andreas Reiche and Daniel Wernecke as representatives of the consulting client, the SV SparkassenVersicherung, accepted the award during a festive gala evening at the Düsseldorf Hotel InterContinental on 3 December.

Specifically, the Detecon consultants were recognized for their project “Building Data Science Teams.” Their task was to collaborate with the SV SparkassenVersicherung, a modern regional insurer that bundles the services of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe in Baden-Württemberg, Hesse, Thuringia, and Rhineland-Palatinate, with the objective of applying digital technologies and analytical intelligence commercially in the insurance business. The goal: Address modern customer needs at an early stage and meet them even better. The project required the operational integration of digital strategies, IT, and use cases.

Experts from the SV SparkassenVersicherung and data scientists from Detecon applied agile and interdisciplinary methods to realize use cases in the Big Data Lab in Stuttgart founded expressly for such projects. Marketing, sales, and big data specialists work together in direct collaboration on projects such as the calculation of the purchase probabilities of insurance products using big data analytics. Results included rapid analytical significance for the probability of success of newly conceived campaigns and a clear, innovative digitalization path for sales and marketing.

“Predictive analytics and machine learning are often new territory in the insurance world. We had to find ways to ensure that various business departments cooperated constructively with internal and external digital experts to achieve a common goal,” said Igor Schnakenburg, lead data scientist at Detecon, in explaining the challenges. “Technologically speaking, it was a question of adapting data science methods and analytical procedures for successful use in the insurance industry.” Steffen Kuhn, Head of the Digital Engineering Center at Detecon, added: “A decisive role was played by the close collaboration of the data scientists with business and economics experts from various divisions. When this succeeds, the valuable insights lead to a realistic calculation of the business case as well as a precise cost-benefit analysis and successful results.”

“We are delighted to receive the Best of Consulting Award for our joint project. We proved our ability to perform and identified scattering loss in our previous customer approach, which we can minimize today,” noted Pawel Kozak, project manager in charge at SV SparkassenVersicherung. “Big data technology has proved its value in practice and consequently aligns products and address even better with the actual interests of our customers.”