The opportunity at hand for digital-first insurance vendors
Aclaimant CEO David Wald talks about how the right data decreases insurance costs and the talent it takes to generate those insights.
There’s no shortage of businesses worldwide that are struggling to survive the coronavirus pandemic. But insurance organizations and vendors that fostered a digital-first business model before this year’s public health and economic crisis may now find themselves in a position for growth.
Such are the aspirations at Aclaimant, the Chicago-based makers of an insight-driven workflow solution for safety and risk management that recently secured a fresh round of investor funding to scale up its business.
Here, Aclaimant CEO and Co-Founder David Wald talks about how his company plans to engage insurance brokers, who are now under increased pressure to provide clients with innovative risk-mitigation data insights that ultimately drive down insurance costs.
PC360: Can you share one or two Aclaimant client success stories, i.e. real-world examples of the company identifying an organization’s risks and subsequently reducing its costs/?
Wald: There are two examples that come to mind when I think about success stories and the role Aclaimant played in helping organizations identify risks and reduce costs. The first is GATE Petroleum. GATE is a heavily-diversified company that operates in a variety of industries, including retail, gas and convenience stores, car washes, fleet and fuel services, real estate, hospitality, and construction materials. Before working with Aclaimant, GATE’s incident management processes relied solely on spreadsheets to report and manage injuries and accidents across multiple business units and hundreds of locations. Aclaimant streamlined their claim reporting process by creating a centralized solution to manage, report, and communicate on all accidents and injuries while automating submission processes to their third-party administrator. Our reporting dashboard provided access to analytics and metrics, giving GATE Petroleum actionable insight at both the organization and business level. Additionally, they reported time savings and efficiencies in both their incident management and claims management processes.
Another example is the work we did with The Branch Group. Based in Roanoke, Va., the Branch Group is made up of four companies in the construction industry covering the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States. They were using paper forms for incident reporting and realized that these forms were often illegible or missing key information, thus slowing their incident management process. Aclaimant provided a digitized solution to ensure accurate information was recorded and all necessary information was complete. We helped the Branch Group streamline its incident management process through our digitized reporting format, including drop-down choices to eliminate errors, required fields to ensure no questions are missed, and a PDF-formatted incident report that mimicked The Branch Group’s own historic report form to easily upload reports into its construction software system. Capturing better and more robust data with built-in checks to ensure accuracy allowed the Branch Group to take a more holistic approach to risk management and drive greater insight and accountability throughout their safety and risk management functions.
PC360: What can you tell us about the product innovation that you aspire to undertake with the funds from your recent Series A? What market needs can be met with such products?
Wald: The core of our offering today has been in our ability to help our customers become better risks. This has been achieved through a careful focus on the functionality and user experience/ease of our product. Those two drivers have allowed us to build a platform that our users love, and has helped them unlock efficiencies in their own environments.
Now that we have successfully proven our ability to drive value in the core of our offering, our focus is on three main areas of innovation: Connectivity, data insights, and automation. For connectivity, we’re working to integrate with core systems that house relevant data to ensure our customers always have up-to-date and accurate information to make informed decisions at every step of their journey. We’re also focused on expanding our data capabilities to drive relevant insights for our users and allow them to more easily identify trends, hazards, issues, and concerns right in their daily workflows and patterns. Finally, on the automation front, we’re focused on helping to alleviate and streamline many of the mundane and repetitive tasks that our users have to tackle, such as federal, state, and compliance paperwork. That way, businesses can be dedicated to action and management as well as driving their risk organizations to the next level.
It is our belief that every organization deserves to be a great risk. Our continued focus on enhancing our offering brings this opportunity to everyone, from small companies to Fortune 100 organizations. Helping businesses unlock the potential of their safety and risk management organizations, control their cost of risk, and make better decisions at every step along the way is key to our mission.
PC360: Part of your funding plans involve adding key in-house talent. What types of skills might you like these new hires to have?
Wald: In order to achieve the next level of growth in our business, we need to add talent with two very different but highly complementary skill sets. The first drives the traditional SaaS growth engine, such as product, development, sales, marketing, and business development positions. These individuals will be key to continue to build a great product, provide an amazing experience for our customers, and grow even faster. The second group of hires for us will be subject matter experts. We feel that we are able to achieve and unlock incredible value for our customers because we not only build a great technology product but because we have people with the industry experience in helping to guide our growth. This includes experts in the areas that our customers operate in, including risk management, insurance, claims, safety, and environmental issues.
It’s our express goal to find leaders in these spaces who are challenging the status quo, leading the pack, and finding new and innovative ways to help businesses become better risks and to incorporate these individuals into our organization. We have been incredibly fortunate to build a team with a unique mix of operational expertise, technology know-how, and risk management experience. That combination has been key to our success and will continue to be our formula going forward.
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