FRISS at the Insurance Innovators Summit

It seems like only five minutes ago that we were at the Insurance Innovators Summit last year, and the calendar has revolved and we were back at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre to the 2022 edition. It’s a great venue and a fitting location for a conference centre to bear our late, great monarch’s name.

You can tell the difference a year makes, significantly more people post COVID, and a noticeable “hum” throughout the conference centre across both days with full audiences across a range of compelling topics addressing how insurance can be made better.

Our focus for the event spanned (surprise, surprise) across the areas of trust automation, fraud detection, customer experience and understanding the customer. Which leads me to my learnings from the speakers at the event and my own humble contribution.

People will remain at the heart of the process

It was inspiring listening to Julia Walker-Smith of BGL talking about how BGL has built a culture of success by focussing on their employees. When all the buzz is around new acronyms, AI, ML, NLP, OCR people will always remain at the heart of the process. As a vendor of technology solutions we absolutely recognise the value of people in the process. The best solutions blend the best of the machine with the best of the human, and ultimately become better together. For us this is about the machine doing the heavy lifting, allowing the people to focus either on the customer, or the suspicious cases that need a closer look. We call this Trust Automation.

Batches are not a long term solution

One of the enjoyable facts of working for a Dutch company is explaining the meaning of British slang words. So when we talk about batches, we are not talking about bread rolls (or your barm cakes, buns, baps or cobs for that matter!) so 2% of the population of Britain can rest easy, your bread rolls are safe. We are talking about those batch processes that create windows for fraudsters to exploit. The speakers, such as Clare Lunn of Markerstudy, Adele Sumner of RSA or Anna Phelps of Marshmallow seemed to agree that real time fraud detection was the future.

For me I posited that there are three elements that need form part of a fraud solution that is fit for the future:

• A fraud platform that has the ability to orchestrate multiple capability and link to insurer core systems in real time

• Fraud detection engines, that includes but is not limited to Artificial Intelligence and Network Analytics that also work in real time. So a link between a claimant and new policyholder who both just entered the data lake can be spotted immediately (not overnight). And yes, there is still a place for good old fashioned rules, judiciously applied!

• An ability to link to other capabilities such as third party data, voice analytics or OCR to provide more data for your models to improve, again in real time.

Ultimately, replacing your legacy fraud detection solution with a new solution that works in batch (and doesn’t at least have a current capability to upgrade to real time) is replacing a legacy solution with a legacy solution.

Customer Experience is the new game

Many of the speakers commented around the focus on the customer and the customer experience, and insurers are battling public perception that states as Jonathan Roomer of Yulife stated, “7/10 people buying the product don’t believe it’s a promise.” This ties in with my learning at the DIA Munich event earlier this year where David Stanchon COO of Wefox, talked about how 70% of their customers believe they are being ripped off.

The promise is that in the event of a loss, the insurer will quickly and efficiently pay the claim. Indeed, many insurers  are focussing on their claims digital journeys and trying to increase the amount of straight through processes that speed the customer on the way. Ultimately, fraudsters love a slick process to extract money inappropriately. If you are digitising your journey without the commensurate fraud detection that shows that you can trust the customer and make a good decision, you are opening the floodgates. We call this Trust Automation, enabling real time determination of good and suspicious applications and claims.

So what’s in it for insurers? By speeding the journey for good customers, insurers address the negative perceptions of the industry, but more importantly the faster a claim settles, the more leakage is controlled, saving money. In assessing a fraud platform, the metrics are often focussed on the fraud savings. We’re missing the bigger trick, the bigger prize is in the reduction in leakage in the vast majority of claims. This is the benefit of Trust Automation.

Finally it was great to be interviewed on video for Insurance Innovators TV by the always excellent Lindley Gooden, accompanied by the excellent Iryna Chekanava of the Lloyd’s Lab. It was great to hear about what’s coming with regard to Cohort 10 of the Lab and also to reflect on what FRISS achieved in Cohort 8 and to talk about our progress since then on building out our US capability for the wider global market. Watch this space in Q1 for news on this.

Finally thanks to Marketforce for organising such a professional and well run event and to Matt Gilham of White Elk Consulting for his excellent moderation of the panel.

Until next year.