Intellect SEEC is a prime example of a company that is poised to revolutionize the insurance industry. The insurtech company is tackling the biggest challenges of insurance with contemporary technologies like big data, AI/ML and IoT in insurance. Its portfolio covers distribution, underwriting, claims and servicing.

While the company has been around for over 25 years, in 2014 it rebuilt its entire technology stack to go cloud-first and deploy contemporary technologies for insurance use cases. The very first result of this restructuring was a risk assessment platform called Intellect Risk Analyst based on technologies like big data and ML which at the time were deemed hype.

Powering Underwriting with Big Data & ML
Insurance underwriting can be a high-touch process involving the expertise of under writers, brokers, third party experts and risk managers. Often, it takes days for a customer to get a bound policy. Risk Analyst is the world’s first AI-based underwriting platform. It can collect and analyze data from thousands of sources to find case specific information, validate key underwriting and rating fields and make the underwriting and rating a lot more precise. It presents not just the past history and facts relevant to a case, but also the leading indicators of potentially adverse events in the future. The result is 3 to 5 percent improvement in loss ratio and up to 70 percent reduction in underwriting time.

Getting the Facts Right
In the insurance industry, it is an open secret that clients or brokers sometimes tend to present a risk in a better light to get a better rate or to get subpar risks through the underwriting process. The company recently conducted a global study of quote submissions to seven major US commercial carriers using Intellect Risk Analyst, and uncovered some startling facts. It discovered that 25 percent of the underwriting data and therefore, the resultant pricing are wrong. The study was conducted between January 2017 and January

2018. This research has for the first time in the history of insurance statistically proven the extent of the misrepresentation of data and its impact on pricing and loss ratio.

"Intellect SEEC understands the opportunity this type of worker-driven proactive risk management brings to insurance"

Loss Prevention over Loss Compensation
The basic premise of insurance is compensation offered after an incident has occurred. Intellect has set out to reimagine this using big data, IoT and augmented reality (AR). Case in point is its partnership with The Safety Compass, an AR based mobile app that aims to make workplaces safer. The app aggregates data from workers in minefields, oil fields, factories, etc. on various hazards posed by equipment handling and larger the work environment.

Intellect SEEC understands the opportunity this type of worker-driven proactive risk management brings to insurance. As workplace safety becomes increasingly preventative, workers’ compensation insurance too will change.

By rewarding safety data with lower premium prices, insurers have a role to play in averting workplace accidents and saving an increasing number of lives. On the other hand, the use of such technologies also opens up a flood of new data sources about working conditions and safety which can lead to much better underwriting and pricing moving forward.

Transforming the Insurance Giant of India
In 2017, LIC, one of the world’s largest insurers partnered with Intellect SEEC for their digital transformation. Millennials represent nearly a third of India’s population, forming a major part of the country’s workforce, both urban and rural. In keeping with their mobile usage habits, LIC set out to boost its digital footprint across various devices and channels. The carrier wanted to create a digital storefront for all aspects of selling and servicing insurance policies.

The carrier was able to go live with their multichannel, multi product, omnidevice, full self service portal within nine months with Intellect’s solution. LIC mobile apps went live from within two months after the launch of the portal. And the overall results are staggering. LIC achieved 1 million+ combined downloads on App Store and Play Store within weeks with 4.2 average rating across iOS and Android apps. Similarly, LIC’s online and mobile transaction counts for both new business and servicing of existing

policies are incredible. These are the direct benefits of increased efficiency and improved customer experience.

Moving Insurance to the Cloud
Insurance industry lags behind other industries when it comes to customer experience, talent attraction and adoption of new technologies. Monolithic, non-scalable technology assets that require point-to-point integration and involve a high degree of customization don’t make it any easier to adopt change. In fact, this is a primary reason why insurers, especially small and medium sized carriers, constantly trade off innovation in favor of keeping the lights on for the business.

Intellect SEEC aims to change this paradigm with cloud. The company’s ubiquitous insurance platform supports the requirements of both life and commercial insurance. The native cloud platform hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) releases innovation capabilities as soon as they become commercially viable, so insurers can access them with simple configuration at their end.

Insurers who have come onboard this platform have started to see the benefits of reduced IT management time and cost. Importantly, for small to mid-sized companies, this helps leverage the skills of their key people in strategic work, rather than IT management.

Last year, AWS recognized Intellect’s commitment to cloud technology and featured the company as a standard bearer of cloud solutions in insurance.

Pioneering Advanced User Experience
This year, Intellect SEEC released their flagship insurance trained chatbot called Ada, named after Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer. Created using ML and natural language processing, Ada can detect customers’ emotions ranging from joy to frustration, but importantly she can process complex financial terms. We have all come across the chatbot that leads you to a dead-end conversation. Ada however, can hold a productive dialogue with both customers and agents, and help them accomplish complicated financial transactions.

It does not stop there. Intellect is bringing smart glasses such as Microsoft Hololens out of the realm of video games and retail, and into insurance. It is actively piloting mixed reality use case for one of its clients, a UK-based wealth management firm. The Hololens based mixed reality solution is targeted at high net-worth clients of the wealth management firm. Using the solution, a customer can visualize her portfolio on large dashboards and interact through voice and gestures.