The Role of Big Data Technology in Revolutionizing the Insurance Industry in Kenya

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of novel ideas and concepts of big data to face the remarkable rise of amounts of data in many business sectors. Meanwhile, the remarkable growth of internet use and social networks have even added not only huge amounts of data to different business sectors but have also added challenges to conventional data processing systems. To deal with the large amount of data, traditional processing techniques have proved to be inefficient and insufficient to provide accurate and meaningful information required for evidence-based decision making. The insurance industry has also heavily relied on processed data for accurate risk assessment, underwriting and pricing. However, the sector today is also dealing with huge amounts of accumulated data, both structured and unstructured, which has made traditional data processing techniques unable to handle. Big data Analytics is an aspect of innovation which has recently gained major attention from both academics and practitioners. Big data analytics is the process of examining big data to uncover information such as hidden patterns, correlations, market trends and customer preferences. These revelations can significantly impact an organization as it provides deeper insights into customer behaviour, operational efficiency, and market trends. This paper aims to assess the role of Big Data adoption in the insurance industry through literature review. The paper presents big data and insurance industry in Kenya, characteristics of big data, the technologies used in big data implementation. It also looks at the beneficial role of adopting big data technology in the insurance sector and concludes that big data analytics stands out as an enabler to insurance organisations in making data-based decisions and providing customized insurance products and services according to customer needs. Finally, the paper encourages future research to examine the levels of big data adoption and its effect in the insurance industry.