The insurance industry has become more digital in recent years as its reliance on data and technology has grown. Despite this, many insurers and insureds still rely on paper — especially when it comes to claims.
Claims professionals will be the first to tell you how time-consuming the paperwork can be. As a former claim insurance attorney in Washington D.C., Chris Cheatham is no stranger to sorting through a sea of papers. He usually represented insurance companies against the federal government or in cases involving large construction projects.
One day he realized the papers he was reviewing “were always really unorganized and it was costing my companies, who were the large carriers, a lot of money.” Within the insurance industry, he would hear of professionals turning to X-Acto knives or Excel spreadsheets; others were simply redlining in order to compare policies and find exclusions. And the job became even more labor intensive when the insurance professional was comparing policies from more than one insurer, which is often the case with large businesses.
In 2012, Cheatham would go on to launch ClaimJet. It allowed users to scan documents and collect electronic data, as well as upload the documents to the software for the accountants, lawyers, consultants who were managing these claims. Two years later, the company found itself working on a large claim. At the same time, underwriters started logging into the software for the first time; soon, someone asked to use the software for policy review.
“It feels like that led to this giant rabbit hole that is now RiskGenius,” says Cheatham.
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|Connecting information
Risk Genius, developer of the RiskGenius Platforms, utilizes highly specialized algorithms and artificial intelligence to organize the world's insurance policy information for carriers, brokers and commissioner offices.
Cheatham, CEO and co-founder of ClaimKit Inc., says the company targets “specialty underwriters and brokers and then the regulators that are working with them” because that's where they've found the most nuanced language. By specialty, he means commercial property & casualty carriers, which is the company's primary focus. In the future, there are plans to expand to all realms of insurance and beyond, augmenting the human efforts, not replacing them.
But Cheatham knows the company can't expand too fast because ”we need to nail insurance before we go other stuff.” This, plus the two challenges he anticipates — managing the sales cycle and helping partners understand how to engage with RiskGenius and vice versa — have Cheatham focused just on the insurance industry for now.
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|The first partnership
“The ultimate goal is to connect all this information. If you have a contract that has insurance requirements, how does that connect to the insurance policy itself?” says Cheatham.
In Oct. 2017, RiskGenius announced the company's first industry partnership with QBE Ventures. QBE North American was the first division to fully implement the RiskGenius Platform, with plans already in place to upload 125,000 policy documents in 2018.
“QBE North America completed a proof-of-concept of the RiskGenius Platform earlier this year, and saw great results leveraging the company's proprietary, machine learning product to compare policies as part of our product development process,” said Bob James, group head of transformation for QBE, in a statement last year.
Using machine learning, the RiskGenius Platform quickly and easily interprets, organizes and standardizes policy language. Such organization and standardization helps underwriters, brokers and regulators understand the trends inherent to complex coverages.
“My mantra is free the forms,” says Cheatham. “I think we need to make forms available to more people so they can understand the language, and a lot of those, especially in commercial insurance, are kind of hidden from view. The more brokers and carriers can interact and understand that stuff, the better.”
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Denny Jacob
Denny Jacob is an associate editor for NU PropertyCasualty360. Contact him at [email protected].
