Unpacking Ivans Benchmarks: An Expert Q&A  

Product leaders within insurance companies face mounting pressures to stay competitive, optimize operations, and adapt to rapidly changing market trends. Tools that enable precise benchmarking, provide actionable industry metrics, and foster informed decision-making are no longer optional – they’re essential.

This pressing need for clarity and efficiency was the focus of a recent Ivans webinar, "Ivans Benchmarks: Stop Guessing, Start Knowing," where our product leaders and strategists unveiled how Ivans Benchmarks powered by Ivans Insights is transforming the way insurance carriers can leverage data for strategic planning, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

To understand the impact and potential of Ivans Benchmarks , let's dive into the key questions and answers from this insightful discussion with Doug McElhaney, Applied Systems Chief Strategy Officer; Thorsten Camp, Ivans Director of Product Management; and Rohan Edwin , Ivans Product Manager of Data & Analytics , as they shed light on the use cases and future of using data to create benchmarks in the P&C insurance industry.

What unique position does Ivans hold in the insurance industry?

Thorsten Camp: Ivans has lived in a unique position in the industry between carriers and the independent agencies for more than 40 years. Our role has been to translate, standardize, and move policy data across the many different systems within the independent agency channel so that carriers, MGAs, and agents can digitally share information.

What problem does Ivans Benchmarks solve for insurance companies?

Thorsten Camp: While carriers have great visibility within their own data, they have very limited visibility into the broader pricing and product trends across the insurance industry. At Ivans, we're in a unique position in that we’re able to analyze bound policy data across the industry – not quotes, not rate filings or modeled estimates – but real policies written through the channel.

Because we sit right in the middle between hundreds of carriers and thousands of agencies across all the leading agency management systems, we provide a consistent, normalized view of that independent agency channel and the activity going through there.

How can carriers use Ivans Benchmarks in their product strategy decisions?

Doug McElhaney: Traditionally, building product strategy as a carrier meant relying on comparative raters or their own policy and quote data to understand if their product and pricing strategy is effective. Benchmarks provides several different ways to answer these strategic questions using real-world data. For example, a carrier who is getting into or expanding within a particular geographic space where they may not have a lot of history or data and wants to understand more about the pricing and trends. They can get a cross-industry, cross-carrier view of where pricing sits and recent trends for that pricing with Benchmarks.

If they wanted to compare where their pricing sits relative to other carriers in a market, they could parse it by a variety of different attributes of the properties in Benchmarks. And if they had modified some of their rates either recently or a few quarters ago, they could start to answer questions like: What's the impact of that rate action we took? Are we realizing what we thought was going to happen? Or has it not actually unfolded the way we expected?

Who in a carrier organization would benefit most from using benchmarking tools?

Thorsten Camp: The primary Benchmarks persona or user is product leadership – the teams responsible for product strategy, pricing direction, and profitability. These are the people making decisions about when to adjust price, where to expand or pull back, and how their products should evolve over time.

Every carrier organizes those teams a little differently, but the responsibilities are usually consistent. Benchmarks is designed to support product decision-making at multiple levels – from leaders setting overall strategy to teams responsible for specific states or regions, to pricing and actuarial partners analyzing rate adequacy, competitiveness, and trend signals.

What Benchmarks does is create a shared fact base. Instead of each team looking at a different slice of data in isolation, everyone can be grounded in the same view of real bound policy behavior across the industry. That alignment helps product leaders move faster, ask better questions, and make more confident, data-driven decisions.

What specific reports and features does Ivans Benchmarks include?

Rohan Edwin: When you log into Benchmarks, you'll see the Trends and Benchmarks report at the top of the page. This report gives you a two-year view of how premiums are changing, both for you and your competitors who are downloading the same types of homeowners policies. This gives you a quick visual snapshot to understand how your premiums align with the against your peers.

Additionally, you can see what your average premium was for any given month and compare it to the other carriers that download policies through Ivans. This dashboard view also includes an Average Premium Distribution report at the bottom of the page. This report shows the spread of policy premiums for your policies and other carriers to help you visualize where your premium ranges are more heavily concentrated for certain types of home policies and if your premium spread aligns with other carriers writing the same type of homeowner’s policies.

How can filters enhance the benchmarking experience?

Rohan Edwin: The real value that comes from Benchmarks is the filters that we've built into the product. These filters allow you to drill into very specific types of homeowner policy data based on various policy details, such as:

• Line of business
• Form types
• Policy status (new business vs. renewals)
• State or three-digit zip code level
• Dwelling limit ranges
• Risk details (construction type, dwelling type, year built, residence type, and number of families)

All these filters give you the flexibility to focus on a specific type of home policy and get an apples-to-apples comparison as to how your pricing compares to other carriers competing with you in that market.

How would a product manager use Benchmarks after making a rate change?

Rohan Edwin: Let's say you had a rate change for HO3 policies in Michigan for homes in a certain dwelling limit range – $200,000 to $600,000 dwelling limit as an example. You will select the HO3 form type, state of Michigan, and set your dwelling limit range, then click Apply.

All reports on the dashboard will update to show just those HO3 Michigan policies and how your premium changes compare. You might see that in March, when your rate change officially went into effect, your premiums have adjusted since that change and seem to be more closely aligned with what other carriers are pricing for these types of home policies in Michigan.

This gives you additional confidence that the rate change was the right decision because you're now becoming much more competitive. Looking at the distribution report, you can also see if your spread of policies is concentrated similarly to other carriers in this market.

How can Benchmarks help investigate renewal performance issues?

Rohan Edwin: When we interviewed carriers about their processes, many of them mentioned they spent a lot of time continuously analyzing renewals to ensure competitiveness and maintain retention with existing customers. This is where Benchmarks can provide fact-based data from across the industry to construct a renewal strategy that aligns with your customers’ expectations.

For example, if you're looking at HO3 renewal policies in Ohio and your internal analytics show you're not doing as well as forecasted on retention, you can use Benchmarks to determine how your renewal pricing strategy and distribution compare with other carriers in that renewal space.

What's on the roadmap for Ivans Benchmarks?

Thorsten Camp: What you're seeing here is just the foundation for Benchmarks, and we're building this in phases. Our next focus area is Personal Auto. Eventually we'll look into other lines including Umbrella and package policies.

We're also looking to go beyond premiums benchmarking. For example, with personal auto, we're looking into benchmarks on the number of drivers, driver age, the number of vehicles, and certain coverage limits. For homeowners, we're planning to deliver reports on the distribution of dwelling limits.

Then we'll be moving on to commercial lines and exploring other ways for data and analytics teams at carriers to access this data, as well as developing an agency version of Benchmarks to ensure the other side of the market can benefit from this data as well.

The whole vision is for Ivans Insights to be a suite of data and analytics solutions with different modules like Benchmarks, Marketing Insights, and other solutions to support product teams, pricing, actuarial distribution, analytics, operations, underwriting, and strategy teams across the industry.

Benchmarking Creates Better Partnerships

Insurance benchmarking has evolved from a nice-to-have to an essential component of strategic decision-making for carriers. Ivans Benchmarks represents a significant advancement in how insurance companies can leverage industry data to optimize their pricing strategies and improve performance metrics.

By providing access to real-bound policy data across the independent agency channel, Ivans Benchmarks enables carriers to validate rate changes, identify growth opportunities, and ensure their products remain competitive in an ever-changing market. The ability to filter data by specific policy details allows for precise, targeted analysis that can drive better decisions and ultimately improve profitability.

As the insurance sector continues to rely on data analytics as a core component of strategic planning, tools like Ivans Benchmarks will become increasingly valuable for carriers seeking to gain a competitive edge through data based on real-world data. The roadmap for future enhancements promises even greater insights across personal and commercial lines.

Ready to stop guessing and start knowing where your premiums stand in the market? Contact the Ivans team today to learn how Ivans Benchmarks can transform your approach to insurance benchmarking and help you make more confident product decisions. Watch our on-demand webinar to learn how to stop guessing with Ivans Benchmarks.