In August, Mary, a nurse from Memphis, was recuperating from double knee surgery when she received a surprising email from her insurance company, Allstate. Allstate Identity Protection (AIP) had detected unauthorized activity on Mary’s bank account. Someone had opened several fraudulent accounts in her name and submitted fake credit applications. The revelation was upsetting, especially at such a vulnerable time for her. But the issue was resolved as quickly as it was revealed. AIP, through sophisticated safeguarding of its customers’ online data, recognized the illegal activity in nearly real time and contacted the financial institutions to close the fraudulent accounts. What could have been disastrous for Mary was merely a bump in the road as she recovered from surgery.
Mary’s story illustrates how insurance has become far more than just car and home coverage. It’s an example of how Allstate, one of America’s largest insurers, is at the forefront of a digital revolution transforming the $1.28 trillion insurance industry. That undertaking aims to cover nearly every aspect of our lives, while forging innovations in data security, privacy, and safety. To shepherd the industry into a new digital era—featuring self-driving cars, digital ID cards, and delivery drones—the company is investing heavily in technological innovations. But more than that, Allstate is relying on its creative, diverse, empowered employees to set new standards in the field.
Ken Durr
Allstate's Cyber Consulting Services Senior Manager
“We’re a tech company that sells insurance,” says Ken Durr, who heads Allstate’s cyber consulting group. “We’re constantly reinventing ourselves and proving that a 90-year-old company can adapt and compete on big data and advanced analytics.”
The Growing Technology of Protection
Allstate has been pioneering technologies since its founding in 1931, but 2008 was a pivotal year. That’s when the company launched an experimental program to offer discounts to drivers willing to share telematics data, first from in-car devices and then from smartphones. Gathered on the road, this data included location, frequent destinations, speed, and braking patterns. A few forward-thinking engineers at Allstate predicted that the information would help make the world safer.
They were right. Suddenly, Allstate could assess data that hinted at actual driver behaviors, rather than relying on actuarial information to help set rates. That meant the company could offer better rates to those with lower risk profiles. Now Allstate leads the industry in telematics, with more than two million connections, a 45 percent increase over the past two years.
By reducing risk through big data, Allstate is improving how it keeps customers safe while saving them money. Allstate could even help drivers avoid collisions by suggesting safer routes. “Big data is the future for us,” Durr says. “It’s changing everything about how insurance operates.”
Allstate’s data revolution might have begun with transportation, but it’s expanding into other areas. By 2025, McKinsey & Company estimates that more than a trillion devices will be plugged into the internet of things—cars, fridges, home heating systems, and more. Allstate wants to develop machine-learning capabilities that can automatically parse the data from these devices to find patterns that help protect customers.
Collecting data is just the first step. Making it useful requires analysis. To do this, enterprising teams at Allstate—with members from a range of personal and professional backgrounds—are inventing tools and techniques to get insights from all this information. In fact, 70 Allstate employees received patents for innovations in 2020 alone.
Today, proprietary image-recognition software, coded in house, enables Allstate to use aerial imagery to determine whether a home is at greater risk for leaks because of the angle of the roof tiles. This aerial-imagery technology can help customers in other ways too, like assessing damage quickly after a hurricane to see if it’s safe for a customer to return.
The company has also developed digital insurance algorithms that, in the event of a hack, search more than 200 million websites for customers’ personal data. Whether the goal is to protect a physical asset or a digital one, Allstate is constantly finding ways to assess risk and offer preemptive protection, as Mary discovered when she was the victim of identity fraud.
Mia Boom-Ibes
Vice President of Information, Security, Strategy, and Innovation
“We have to reinvent how we do our work based on how the world is changing,” says Mia Boom-Ibes, vice president of information security, strategy, and innovation. “And we can’t be late. Reinvention has to happen all the time.”
Building the Workforce of the Future
To keep pushing the boundaries of technology and innovation, Allstate relies on the diversity of its employees—a technical workforce of professionals with backgrounds ranging from materials sciences and chemistry to banking and geography. And greater diversity is leading to greater innovation.
For example, technologies supporting voice and facial recognition are more accurate when they’re designed and built by people who look and talk the same as the customers who’ll use them. Diverse developers can create software and products that work better for everyone, regardless of the user’s skin tone, accent, or gender.
That’s why Allstate empowers its team to run with great ideas to create the future of protection products. And the company is on a hiring spree. Right now, Allstate is focusing on recruitment in the digital realm. Of its roughly 45,000 employees, nearly 9 percent are coders and engineers, and that number is growing. They use artificial intelligence, neural networks, and machine learning to pull meaning from tens of billions of data points, answering questions like: What’s signal? What’s noise? What firewalls do we need to protect customer identities? And how can Allstate continue to use data to make the world a safer place?
To answer these questions, Allstate is partnering with major research institutions and leading universities. But it’s Allstate employees—hired because they see opportunity where others see barriers—who will define how the company rises to the latest tech challenges.
“All companies are seeing the implications of changing technology,” says Boom-Ibes. “To protect our customers, we have to continue to reinvent ourselves, and that comes from focusing on and prioritizing the people who make it all possible.”
“I was a seasoned IT expert before coming here,” says Durr, who spent a decade consulting for top tech companies before joining the insurance industry. “Allstate is a whole new world. From a security and technology perspective, we’re leaps and bounds ahead of many organizations, and that’s a good feeling. It’s why working here can be so much fun.”
Want to join Allstate in building the future of protection? See all of their opportunities here.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Allstate.
