While insurance companies are expected to accurately assign the right territory to every policy in order to calculate the correct premium and avoid market-conduct fines. Territories can be geographically complex and quite often do not follow ZIP code boundaries. This frequently leads to territory assignment errors, which range from 6% to over 25%.

Territory assignment errors are costly; Assignment errors mean that incorrect premiums are being quoted or charged, which creates both customer retention risk problems when overcharging occurs, and premium revenue loss with undercharging.

Group 1 technology allows for this critical analysis to be done "on the fly" rather than on an infrequent schedule. By implementing a business geographics approach, our numerous insurance customers have the ability to rate and bind policies in real-time over the web.

High Definition Data Business Processes
The High Definition Data for Rating Territory Assignment can be broken down into two Business processes:

1. Geocoding: Geocoding determines the location (latitude/longitude) of an address. Addresses — whether entered by agents, call center personnel or even by customers — are usually very "dirty" and contain misspellings and erroneous or missing information.
   One of the primary functions provided by geocoding is to correct, clean and standardize the addresses to conform to United States Postal Service (USPS) conventions. Once an address has been "standardized" and geocoded, it is ready to be analyzed.
    
2. Rating Territory Determination and Assignment: Once an address is precisely located, the locations are spatially compared against company-specific rating territories and matched to the correct territory. Underwriting and rating occur in several business processes.
   Any time a new policy, endorsement or renewal is entered in your system, address information must also be entered for that location. Underwriting and rating processes are based on this information, which determines if the policy is accepted and what the final premium is.
   Group 1 Software's HDD solutions can help eliminate the incorrect determinations that contribute to shortfalls in underwriting execution which directly affect the company performance.