Insurance partnership creates blueprint for ‘perfect collaboration’

Seminar with BDFI and Allianz Personal Lines

Speakers L-R: Jess Ogden, Kieran Billingham, Marisela Gutierrez Lopez and Merve Alanyali

6 June 2024

An important part of BDFI’s mission is collaborating with industry and community partners to do digital innovation differently. Over three years, Dr Marisela Gutierrez Lopez and Prof Susan Halford have been collaborating with Allianz Personal Lines Business, Black South West Network and Knowle West Media Centre to produce new pathways forward on explainable AI.

An ongoing partnership between BDFI and Allianz Personal Lines Business has highlighted the importance and benefits of using sociotechnical methods, combining ethnography, focus groups and interviews, to produce new insights for business on explainable AI.

To achieve this, Dr Marisela Gutierrez Lopez has been embedded inside Allianz Personal Lines Business for three years, with the data science team, collaboratively researching how machine learning is being used.

She has been working alongside Dr Merve Alanyali, Head of Data Science Academic Partnerships an Research, and Kieran Billingham, Senior Data Scientist from Allianz Personal Lines Business.

Merve said: “A significant impact about this collaboration is how we worked as a team. Marisela is so well embedded in our team that we worked together collaboratively from the get-go. That level of collaboration is what made the project so different and successful.

“We created a continuous knowledge share throughout the project, rather than a few milestones and sporadic touchpoints. This enabled us to bring a lot of tangible impact back to the business.

“This project created the blueprint of a perfect collaboration with the university. On other projects we’re collaborating with academic partners, we’re trying to replicate this way of interaction as much as we can. The outcomes exceeded what we expected and anticipated. We look forward to our future collaborations with BDFI and future academics.”

Kieran explained: “BDFI has helped us to bridge the gap with our stakeholders, and through this project we researched, observed, and got into the detail of what’s going on. Marisela set up a neutral playing field, and through her ethnography work, she gave us a really good idea of what the business is doing and how these relationships are actually working.

“She has helped people to widen their thinking, which can be challenging at times in a very heavily regulated industry.”

Marisela, Merve and Kieran recently presented a seminar at BDFI going into the details of their three-year project. You can view the whole seminar on the BDFI YouTube channel.

Further information

You can read more about the origins of the collaboration on a BDFI blogpost.

The project has been managed by BDFI and funded by Allianz Personal Lines Business.