Sears Merritt (Photo: MassMutual)
Sears Merritt is one of the people helping life insurers figure out what applying fast computers, giant databases, and rocket-scientist-type math to insurance can do for performance.
Merritt has been the chief data scientist at Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company since 2015, and he is one of the fathers of the artificial intelligence (AI) technology inside the silicon brains of Haven Life, MassMutual's web-based life insurance sales startup. MassMutual now has about 80 people on its data science team, up from none in 2013.
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Merritt has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a doctorate in computer science from the University of Colorado, and a dissertation that provides mathematical models for understanding competition. To create the dissertation, he used collections of data that, in some cases, took up more than 80 terabytes or storage space, or the equivalent of the disk space available on about 400 typical laptop computers.
He's now applying similar statistical analysis and database-tending skills to exploring the secret life of insurance underwriting data.
Life insurance underwriters and actuaries have always been able to look at one or two variables, such as weight and occupation, affect mortality. Graphs that show how one or two variables change over time are common.
The actuaries have had a hard time analyzing the effects of many different, possibly related variables simultaneously. To simplify their work, they have often assumed that key variables would stay the same over time, or change in a steady way over time.
A MassMutual AI system can now take large batches of data and create, what for the AI system, amounts to a high-resolution, AI-friendly graph, with a different dimension for each variable, and with the each variable plotted in a way that reveals each variable's kinks and curves.
A human cannot see or think in enough dimensions to look at a many-dimensional graph the way an AI can see it. A well-designed AI can find multi-dimensional bubbles and tangles in the graph that may show how the variables interact with one another, and where real claims experience appears to be much different from what the actuaries' old, human-friendly models predicted.
MassMutual's data scientists then have to use statistical testing techniques to decide whether the apparent relationships or gaps are real, or the result of data or AI analysis problems.
One result has been MassMutual's new LifeScore360 tool. The tool can take 40 types of traditional life insurance underwriting data from a user, convert the data points into a risk score, and spit out a graph explaining the risk score.
The list of companies using the LifeScore360 tool includes iPipeline, a life insurance technology company, and Swiss Re.
Merritt came to ThinkAdvisor Life/Health offices in New York for an interview Thursday. Here are five things Merritt about the future of MassMutual's AI systems during the interview.
1. Life insurance is just the start.
MassMutual is working on applying similar AI-based analytical techniques to disability insurance and annuities, Merritt said.
MassMutual is also working on a risk scoring tool for people who want to apply for life insurance without providing samples of blood, saliva or other bodily fluids.
2. Insurance regulators seem to understand what MassMutual wants to do.
