Our thoughts

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is a common medical problem. It can be caused by a number of other medical conditions such as chronic kidney disease, thyroid disorders and other hormonal upsets, and a rare adrenal gland tumour called phaeochromocytoma. But most of the time hypertension has no obvious cause, although sometimes it is associated with overweight or a diet with an overly high salt content, and people of Afro-Caribbean heritage seem to be more susceptible to it. If left unchecked, high blood pressure can damage kidney function, enlarge the heart and accelerate the process of arterial degeneration; thus hypertension…

When you have deployed an underwriting engine, that is not the end of the journey. Quite the opposite: it is just the beginning. You will have done extensive testing before launch to check that the rules are applying the same underwriting philosophy as your human underwriters, so you can rightly have a lot of faith in the original set-up. However, you can’t test absolutely everything – every possible case, every possible scenario – so there is a need to monitor what the engine is doing, and in particular how the rules are working. If something is not quite right, some…