UESA : An Underwriting Expert System Advisor for Insurance Policies

The global insurance industry provides investment and supportive insurance services such as: motor/vehicle, fire, home, personal accident, product liability, public liability and professional indemnity. These services are very beneficial to private individuals and companies and critically depend on the actual factors and risks involved in the insurance policy. There are risks involved in taking up or embarking on insurance policies. To analyse all the factors involved in providing insurance to individual or companies is a difficult and time consuming job. Through a design-based research approach, this paper therefore proposes an Underwriting Expert System Advisor (UESA) that allows a less experienced individual judge a particular insurance policy before endorsement. The proposed UESA helps an individual calculate all factors and risks involved in taking on a particular insurance policy and advices which policy is best to be chosen in accordance to the individual’s interests and finance ability. From an insurance perspective of Ghana, the UESA in the paper examines three insurance policies, namely: i) Motor Vehicle Insurance, ii) Personal Accident Insurance, and iii) Travel Insurance. The knowledge-base collected for the UESA proposed in this paper consists of a collection of knowledge from insurance underwriting experts and a website and constitutes a 16 Rule-Based procedure/strategy.