Reading severity bands without drowning in noise

Severity bands only help a risk floor when the cut points stay still from one pack to the next. Moving the ฿500,000 threshold mid-year because a single fleet loss arrived late creates false stories about the rest of the book.

We start with paid and incurred amounts for closed and open claims, then freeze bands for at least four reporting cycles. Late large losses get a callout note rather than a quiet redraw of every chart axis.

Cause codes matter as much as money. A motor total loss coded as glass repair will sit in the wrong band forever. Before the first trend pack, we walk the top twenty cause codes with the claims lead and write a short dictionary the extract must honor.

When leadership asks why severity rose, the answer should point to a band migration, a known event, or a coding fix—not a spreadsheet that changed definitions overnight.