Why data literacy is essential for growth

Before March 2020, I couldn’t have imagined skipping my usual train commute into central London each day and working out of my spare room for almost two years. Thankfully, we had the tech and infrastructure in place to work seamlessly from anywhere.

But being able to see data points or text on a screen anywhere, anytime is quite another thing than grasping their wider context and value. It would be like 'seeing' rather than 'watching' or 'hearing' instead of 'listening'. When it comes to data literacy the idea is the same. Employees not only need data points at their fingertips but also the ability to capture and process them in a way that creates meaningful connections and creates value for the business.

For us in the re/insurance industry, the explosion in available data coupled with our ability to access and leverage it more effectively is a great chance to better understand risk and risk exposure. We're now able to develop new data-driven services which, in turn, means risks become more insurable. And by employing our modelling expertise, we can predict and mitigate risk before an event even happens.

As data becomes ever more strategically relevant to the re/insurance industry, the big question is whether it is giving employees the ability to make the best use of the data they have.

Beyond important tech investments, investing in a strong data culture and empowering employees with data literacy is critical. This will enable organisations to fully benefit from data and analytics insights and power the development of new insurance solutions – like Swiss Re's plug and play platform impact+. Given the value of new insights we can gain from data, this kind of investment has a high return.

Seen another way, data literacy is the ability to turn seeds into fruit-bearing trees. Because seeds need to be cultivated, it's important we enable employees from all backgrounds, in every part of the business, to boost their data literacy.

I'm not suggesting that every employee needs to be a data scientist with deep knowledge of AI algorithms. But as data becomes part of every step of the value chain, competence has to match up with the needs of our business. It would be a missed opportunity if an employee didn’t have the capability to make sense of the data points they have for the business.

To drive a data culture at Swiss Re, we introduced data management roles and governance standards with key principles on data ownership and data quality. We're fostering this culture change with our Data Guiding Principles designed to serve as behavioural "ground rules" for all employees. We also provide a wealth of education and engagement activities across Swiss Re, such as DataCamps and Datathons. There's no doubt in my mind that successful digital transformation must go hand in hand with the upskilling of employees in data literacy.

At Swiss Re, data is an essential fuel for our business. The combination of our excellent data and the ability of our people to generate insights from that data is our core differentiator that helps our clients succeed.