There is not a conference I or colleagues attend that is not heralding the role of data in assessing and addressing business risk. That data offers the insights upon which people and business can plan for the future – whatever that may bring.

I was reminded of this earlier in the week when our parent company raised its re/insurance industry loss estimate for the wind and flood impacts of hurricane Ian to between $31bn and $53bn.

The data analysis showed not only the scale of the damage but, crucially, will support city planners in making better decisions about where residential development makes sense, from standard construction homes to manufactured home communities.

Hurricane Ian’s destructive power was enhanced by the huge growth in recent years in coastal real estate. All of a sudden, the data is making things very clear. The housing markets in Florida will face difficult times as residents assess the impact and try to pick up the pieces left by the devastating storm.

But for us to really leverage insight on our own shores, at a macro and granular level, and combine it with some of the expertise and depth of knowledge out there, other things have to be in place. Not least of these is the demise of data silos. As we move toward more cloud based, agile, interoperable application programming interface (API) based systems, we will harness the power of multiple data sets that will shed new light on old problems – and may even turn out to uncover new opportunities.

We need to work hard at ensuring the data we are all using is of the requisite accuracy, completeness, and timeliness to do the job we expect of it. And, of course, we need to have data security – one of the greatest identified risks for organisations according to risk managers at a recent event I attended.

Finally, if we have these things in place, we can apply our minds to the interpretation of many insights that await us. We cannot have a process underpinned by bad data and we cannot have good data and tools misinterpreted by unwise minds. We need to know what to use and when to use it.

Flood data may well tell you if a house in on a flood plain, but how significant is that flood data if the property in a flood plain has a set of steps measuring 30 inches to the front door? An opportunity to lend may be overlooked if we use data inappropriately.

This means we need expertise to understand what we are being told. As experts, valuers and surveyors make judgements about property all the time without even considering how they employ reason and experience and expertise to finesse decisions.

No machinery can do that and it is not likely to be here anytime soon. Our current use of data is binary, and it deliver consistent results but not individual nuance. That suffices in many cases but just as individuals’ circumstances have evolved through developments such as the growth in the gig economy and self-employment and more people having multiple incomes streams, so has UK property. How much better could it be if we harnessed data and experience more completely?

There is a difference between understanding what your borrowers are really buying and simply ensuring it retains enough value if it is repossessed. Data today is invariably used to check if something passes muster – but it should be used to identify opportunity.

Mark Blackwell Chief Operating Officer Core Logic UK