Insurance Luminaries 2023 Technology Innovation Honorees
Leading Light: Insurance Luminaries set a high bar. Here are the Class of 2023 honorees for Technology Innovation. (Part 1 of 5)
When someone is referred to as a “leading light,” it means they are respected, prominent and influential in their endeavors: Think George Washington Carver in agriculture, Albert Einstein in physics, J.P. Morgan in finance or Martha Graham in dance.
This marks the third year that PropertyCasualty360.com has highlighted P&C insurance professionals and organizations that are pushing for fresh thinking around some of the most pressing issues of our time. Honorees this year are recognized in five categories that reflect the state of the industry: Claims Innovation, Coverage Innovation, Risk Management Innovation, Technology Innovation, and Innovation in Workplace Culture.
Nominations were submitted online during the spring and early summer, and then scored using a 25-point rubric that took into account each nominee’s success in setting and achieving goals, impacting the industry, illustrating results, furthering modernization and serving as preeminent examples when it comes to business service and standards.
Visit this page to find out more about this annual recognition program, and perhaps mark your calendar to submit a nomination in 2024.
What follows are the Technology Innovation honorees in PropertyCasualty360’s Class of 2023 Insurance Luminaries recognition program. Honorees in this category are pace-setters who push the industry forward in terms of digitalization, modernization and customer experience.
ACORD Transcriber
Product
The insurance industry has historically relied extensively on paper forms, but now needs to transfer the data on paper to a digital format. ACORD Transcriber is an AI/ML-powered document digitization tool. It automates the process of extracting data from forms. Its smart extraction capabilities allow it to work around variabilities and errors in filled-out forms. It can even extract data from highly unstructured documents (such as SOVs) that have historically represented a challenge for automated extraction. The platform can integrate with leading CRM platforms such as Salesforce, enabling straight-through processing of documents.
One ACORD user found that it reduced turnaround times for claims payment by 50%, reduced the manual effort to process claims transactions by 60%, and enhanced the quality of data by 80%. https://www.acordsolutions.com/solutions/transcriber
AskFetch
Product
Ask Fetch is an AI-powered tool from Trace Meek and Josh Mirabella, creators of Fetch! Underwriting Made Easy. Ask Fetch lets insurance industry professionals utilize the power of Open AI and machine learning to ensure everyone has fast access to accurate information. Ask Fetch! also leverages AI to help insurance professionals quickly deal with many mundane tasks.
After you provide Ask Fetch with your documents, such as underwriting guidelines, employee manuals, and more, you can simply ask the AI questions about the documents instead of searching the documents yourself for answers. Ask Fetch will quickly give you accurate answers to your questions. You can also ask it to do tasks such as writing emails or creating spreadsheets. https://askfetch.com
Bees360
Company
Bees360 uses AI and drone technology to deliver accurate, reliable, unbiased, and consistent property assessments. Insurers schedule a property inspection with Bees360. Instead of having a human inspector wander the property, a certified and licensed drone pilot will navigate the property with the drone to collect high resolution images and data points. The Bees360 AI analyzes the property and identifies any potential issues. These are included in a comprehensive report to the underwriter, allowing them to properly assess property risks with confidence and accurately price the necessary coverages.
In addition to the impartial, standardized results of these inspections, they are less expensive than hiring property inspectors. Drones also allow for safe inspection of potentially dangerous properties, keeping inspectors safe. Bees360 has a nationwide network of over 3000 certified drone pilots so they can instantly provide insurers with accurate and unbiased inspections. https://www.bees360.com/
Dr. Michael Bewley
Individual
Dr. Michael Bewley’s strategic thinking and leadership has helped his team at Nearmap to advance one of the most accurate and richest artificial intelligence offerings in the market. Applying AI and machine learning technology to detailed aerial imagery is transforming the insurance industry. As climate change and other factors drive dynamic losses, insurance businesses utilizing a reactive “repair and replace” methodology are struggling to survive. Nearmap gives insurers the power to take a more proactive “predict and prevent” approach. Photographic documentation provides agents and policyholders an accurate view into any potential issues on a property and gives actionable recommendations to help protect homes and businesses against damage.
A major U.S. carrier worked with Nearmap to look at trends leading to the spread of a major wildfire. The data showed that tree overhang and medium to high vegetation increased risk. The carrier used this insight to help its customers lower their fire risk. https://www.nearmap.com/us/en
Claim Genius
Company
Claim Genius specializes in the development of AI solutions for the insurance industry. Its GeniusInspect platform combines Deep Machine learning algorithms and image recognition capabilities to analyze photos and videos of damaged vehicles. The software can accurately assess the extent of damage and estimate repair costs. It can identify and classify various types of vehicle damage, including dents, scratches, and more complex issues. By identifying the severity of the damage and recommending suitable repair solutions, it lets adjusters settle claims quickly and accurately.
The system can often eliminate the need for on-site inspections, allowing insurance companies to reduce manual labor, streamline operations, and improve customer satisfaction. In addition, the platform can integrate with existing insurance systems, allowing for seamless adoption and integration into existing workflows. https://www.claimgenius.com/
Clearspeed
Company
Clearspeed’s voice analysis technology facilitates faster and more accurate claims triage. It helps insurers expedite low risk claims while flagging high0risk cases that require further review or investigation. Clearspeed has an accuracy rate of greater than 97% and it’s neutral, impartial and unbiased. This lets insurers pay low-risk claims with confidence and spend their investigative resources on the claims where it is likely to matter.
As a side benefit, Clearspeed lets insurers eliminate many of the paper-based forms for personal identification, filing claims, and more if they want. The cloud-based service does not require on-site installation, integration with other IT systems, or customization to support different languages. It’s easy to employ and highly effective. In the first year of using this technology, one client was able to pay some claims 30 times faster than before, while saving nearly $1 million in potential fraud losses. The client identified a more than 30 times return on investments. https://www.clearspeed.com/
Coterie Insurance Dashboard
Product
In July 2022, Coterie launched its updated dashboard that enables partners (including agents and brokers) to get a bindable quote in seconds, using just a business name and address. Using an automated underwriting engine (called Sleuth) to draw from publicly available information to underwrite the risk and deliver a bindable quote in an average of just 89 seconds from beginning to end. The new system has cut the time from quote to bind in half.
The system makes small business insurance more profitable for agents, brokers, and partners. It also makes insurance more accessible for small businesses that have historically fought through a long, burdensome process dealing with underwriters. The current process is so fast and easy that even busy small business owners can get the insurance they need to protect themselves, their business, their employees and their customers. https://coterieinsurance.com/
Marcus Daley
Individual
Marcus Daley’s career trajectory from startups through the metamorphosis of Fortune 500 companies like S&P Global, Microsoft and Intel gives him a transformative understanding of data technology.
When he turned his attention to the difficulties faced by small and medium businesses in obtaining ideal insurance coverage, he realized it was time for a reevaluation of risk assessment methodologies. He has championed the notion that the evaluation of risks for individual companies does not require a Big Data approach. Instead, he championed using generative AI, machine learning, and other cutting-edge technologies to get a better handle on the “small data problem.” NeuralMetrics extracts actionable risk-assessment insights from dynamic, public information sources to enable precise, contextual underwriting. In addition, the real-time, easy-to-deploy data engines facilitate exceptional policyholder services to offer genuine value for all parties in insurance transactions. https://neuralmetrics.ai/
Lakshan De Silva
Individual
When Lakshan De Silva started in business, he realized that underwriters were relying on slow, manual and ineffective internet searches to find data about applicants for small business insurance. As Chief Data Scientist at Bold Penguin, he helped the company develop two data driven analytics products: CauseLink and SubmissionLink.
These products allow underwriters to gather practical insights from structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, making the extraction, enrichment and comprehension of underwriting data for small business insurance instantaneous and frictionless. As a result, some of the largest carriers as well as numerous small digital agencies have adopted Bold Penguin’s tools to empower their small business insurance lines. De Silva aspires to continue innovating on these products, further decreasing expense and loss ratios to cut the costs of small business insurers. https://www.boldpenguin.com/
Earnix Price-It
Product
Earnix Price-It is an all-in-one intelligent pricing solution offering dynamic pricing backed by robust data science, analytical modeling, and AI capabilities. Combining Earnix analytics with pricing and rating platforms in a cloud-based architecture provides flexibility and scalability for continued customer growth. It eliminates silos and handoffs between teams and data sets, quickly and efficiently tying both IT components and business elements in a streamlined end-to-end process. Information quickly and seamlessly flows between linked systems, enabling insurers to monitor the performance of deployed rates and adapt pricing strategies in real time, while eliminating numerous potential data errors.
Among other benefits, our customers have reported reducing their rate creation from six months to less than four days, and completing re-rating in just four minutes, rather than seven hours. In addition, it cut error correction time by 95% and led to an almost 100% reduction in fines from filing process errors. https://earnix.com/
Sneha Godbole
Individual
As Director of Data Science at Verisk, Sneha Godbole has been instrumental in the development of Verisk’s Discovery Navigator. With dual Master of Science degrees (from University of Utah and SUNY Buffalo) and a Data Science Specialization certificate from Johns Hopkins University, Godbole developed extensive expertise outside of Verisk. Within Verisk, she started as an intern and has advanced through numerous roles by optimizing workflows, enhancing customer experiences, creating time and cost savings, and improving claims management.
For the last seven years, Sneha has collaborated with business stakeholders to solve workflow challenges with automated solutions. Among these solutions is Discovery Navigator, which she worked on with Kate Riordan.
Discovery Navigator is a claims management solution that utilizes artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to transform and automate medical record review. This optimizes claims resolution to save time and money. The software can cut review time by 90% and delivers 13:1 ROI for users. https://www.verisk.com/insurance/products/discoverynavigator/
Garret Gray
Individual
Garret Gray, president of CoreLogic’s Insurance Solutions segment, has an undying passion for creating technology to empower insurance professions to focus on people instead of processes.
In 2008, Gray established Next Gear Solutions to sell DASH, a job management and workflow automation platform for property restoration procedures. Adding claims workflow tools expanded the utility of DASH, and by 2021, seven out of the top ten carriers were using these claims solutions. Seeking acquisition by CoreLogic allowed further improvement of the system, taking previously disjointed solutions and combining them as a group of cohesive solution sets to form an integrated digital ecosystem of technologies for underwriters, hazard and risk, claims, and restoration professionals.
Gray sees innovation as a corporate responsibility. It follows that he chooses to focus on technologies that benefit customers. By establishing an official feedback loop, Gray ensures that CoreLogic’s full roadmap is guided by the needs of its customers. https://www.corelogic.com/
Kenneth Gregg
Individual
Through his decades of experience in the insurance industry, Ken Gregg learned the industry’s shortcomings. He set out on a mission to use innovative technology to create exceptional customer experiences, and the result is MY180.
MY180 is a comprehensive system that seamlessly drives the entire policy lifecycle. It gives agents the power to quote and bind policies in under three minutes anywhere with its mobile app. It also empowers customer service representatives to provide exceptional service and support. Organizations can use the business intelligence dashboards to get real-time statistics on performance. Policyholders can also benefit from the app. Once they gain access to the platform via one or more policies, they can view their documents, make payments, check the status of their claims, and even conduct self-home inspections. https://orion180.com/
Hourly.io
Company
Hourly.io provides a powerful platform for ensuring small businesses get accurate and affordable workers’ compensation rates. By combining workers’ comp, payroll, and time/ attendance tracking in a single platform, Hourly.io matches workers’ comp premiums with their monthly payroll. This lets small businesses pay only for the insurance they need, avoiding big end-of-year bills that can arise if yearly payroll estimates don’t match actual payroll at year’s end.
Hourly’s innovative approach also helps small businesses get accurate premiums for hourly and mobile workers. Most carriers only collect two data points about workers, which isn’t enough to accurately calculate risk for hourly and mobile workers. As a result carriers either charge artificially high rates or pass over businesses with these types of employees. Hourly collects hundreds of thousands of data points to accurately price risk. As a result, Hourly.io gives many small businesses access to more affordable insurance. https://www.hourly.io/
INSTANDA
Company
INSTANDA offers a no-code, cloud native insurance solution enabling insurance carriers and MGAs to agilely build new products. In the rapidly changing modern environment, insurers need to be able to rapidly create products for emerging risks but are often burdened with legacy systems and process es that make it hard to innovate. As a result, new products may miss the market opportunity or be too expensive to launch.
INSTANDA’s tools let insurers move from concept to MVP to full product in months or even weeks at scale. Over 85 carriers and MGAs have launched new products and portals globally with INSTANDA. One MGA launched a telematics-enabled commercial auto product in just six weeks. One client launched 38 new P&C products in 2022 using INSTANDA. The client doubled premiums month over month by launching into new markets. https://www.instanda.com/us
IntellectAI
Product
IntellectAI’ss feature-rich, comprehensive AI-powered underwriting ecosystem seamlessly handles the complexities of Commercial and Specialty insurance. Designed to help carriers, MGAs and reinsurers run more efficient and effective underwriting operations, the system supports well-informed underwriting decisions with full transparency of source.
The product includes multiple powerful modules, including Magic Submission, Xponent, and Risk Analysis. Magic Submission is an advanced AI-enabled and data-driven single and multi-line submission ingestion, extraction, validation, enrichment and triage solution designed by underwriters. Xponent is a highly configurable underwriting workbench for account-centric underwriting and AI-driven risk monitoring. Variations for Commercial, Specialty and E&S carriers are available. Risk Analysis identifies risk factors from hundreds of structured and unstructured sources, including line-specific guidance for underwriters. Customers using IntellectAI have experienced 87% time savings and cost reductions greater than 50%. https://www.intellectai.com/
InvoiceCloud
Product
InvoiceCloud is the flagship product of EngageSmart, which offers vertically tailored customer engagement software and integrates payments capabilities. InvoiceCloud’s true SaaS solution is designed to meet the unique needs of insurance carriers to help improve the premium payments experience. It helps insurers improve policyholder satisfaction and increase payments processing efficiencies. EngageSmart works with each client to integrate with their existing infrastructure and find solutions for the specific needs of their customers. InvoiceCloud offers a comprehensive and continually expanding range of payment methods to meet the expectations of the modern insurance customer in a true cloud infrastructure to keep payments processes streamlined and up-to-date.
One client that adopted InvocieCloud in 2021 saw a 211% increase in electronic payment adoption and a seven times increase in AutoPay adoption among policyholders. Another adopted InvoiceCloud in April 2022 and saw a 35% increase in AutoPay adoption and a 30% decrease in billing and payment-related calls. https://www.engagesmart.com/
Jeff Mongeon
Individual
Beginning as a producer, Jeff Mongeon developed a personal client base and began building experience in the industry. Utilizing his in-depth knowledge of carriers’ underwriting processes, the independent agent technology stack, and the regulatory landscape, he co-founded Polly. He became interested in ways to move the industry forward and discovered a powerful way to deliver unexpected value by embedding a world-class insurance experience into the car and home buying processes.
Through his leadership, Polly has created extensive reach within the embedded insurance category. The company currently partners with more than 1,700 dealerships nationwide, and has generated more than 2.5 million quotes, placing over $11 billion in car and home insurance. https://www.polly.co/
Nationwide’s Partner Platform
Program
Nationwide built the Partner Platform to make it easy for partners to work with the company, enabling growth through partnerships with embedded insurance offerings. Nationwide was among the first U.S. incumbent insurance carrier to build and market a holistic platform to enable partners and developers to digitally deliver products from across the company’s breadth of protection solutions.
The Nationwide Partner Platform has three domains serving partnerships across the enterprise: a welcoming Partner Portal, a best-in-class API Digital Products & Tech Library, and Partnership Enablement for onboarding and supporting partnerships. In addition, the Partner Platform is backed by a dedicated onboarding team to advise and consult with partners on how to co-create customer journeys that bring value to the customer, the partner and Nationwide.
The platform lets Nationwide go to market with partners in weeks instead of months. It has enabled 70-plus partnerships, generated millions in revenue, and spurred five new business model concepts through innovating with new partners. https://www.nationwide.com/
Players Health
Company
Players Health offers risk management services to sports organizations, especially those serving young or amateur athletes. They realized that they were in a unique position to offer insurance a market segment where they were already providing risk management services. They set up MGA operations and partnered with OwlSurance, a business unit of ValueMomentum, and Socotra to implement several components of their new interface and insurance products.
Their new system achieved $4 million forecasted GWP in 2022 via the agent portal and improved the speed-to-quote by 85%. The acceptance and bind turnaround time was just five minutes. The rollout of the general liability product took only 90 days in all U.S. states, with the accident and health insurance product following soon after. playershealth.com
Polly
Company
Polly has revolutionized the insurance purchasing process for car buyers by seamlessly integrating insurance with the car buying experience. Their innovative embedded insurance technology ensures a frictionless journey for customers, eliminating detours and enhancing the overall experience. Polly integrates into key dealer systems, including desking, credit, menu, retailing and CRM/DMS, providing automatic engagement in an easy-to-use system. The pre-fill feature simplifies the process for customers, while giving them the option to compare rates from Polly’s network of 40+ carriers. The process creates a win-win situation by offering savings for car buyers as well as referral income for salespeople and dealers.
As a result, Polly has a presence at over 1,700 dealerships nationwide, generating more than 2.5 million quotes, and facilitating the placement of over $11 billion in car and home insurance. https://www.polly.co/
RPS Check Outsourcing
Company
Risk Placement Services (RPS), a Gallagher company, wanted to automate mailing physical checks to agencies, retailers and other accounts payable. The company’s legacy process included scanning physical checks into ImageRight and mailing manually, often taking multiple employees a full day of work. To reduce this labor-intensive process, the company developed an application to automatically pull data from accounts payable and send it to a third-party vendor for check production and mailing.
The project took 11 months, starting with planning in December 2021, and launched in November 2022. Working around legacy systems on both sides required excellent communication and remaining open to new ideas. The project has proven worth the investment. In the first six months since launch, the system processed more than 25,000 checks, saving 1,000 person-hours of labor by eliminating a legacy process that required one to three minutes to process a single check. The team dedicated time saved to more value-added tasks for clients. https://www.rpsins.com/
Kate Riordan
Individual
Kate Riordan expertly bridges the gap between business and technology. She has a phenomenal ability to think about an insurance user’s automation need and to explain it well to technical teams, which helped her launch the sophisticated Discovery Navigator along with Sneha Godbole. Riordan holds a J.D. from Suffolk University Law School. Her legal background, including elder law and estate planning, helped her shape the functionality of Discovery Navigator.
Discovery Navigator is a revolutionary claims management solution that utilizes artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to transform and automate medical record review. This optimizes claims resolution to save time and money. The software can cut review time by 90% and delivers 13:1 ROI for users. http://www.verisk.com/insurance/products/discoverynavigator/
SubmissionIQ
Product
SubmissionIQ is an end-to-end underwriting workbench. The interface is configured to client requirements and provides teams with everything needed to turn data into decisions with maximum efficiency in a single, collaborative environment. The intuitive interface is designed for the user, minimizing the clicks required to get the information you need. Clients get to customize the ingestion approach, focusing on the use cases of the underwriting team to extract only the critical data needed to complete submissions and rate. It can also quickly call in third-party data to fill gaps and validate submission data directly in the platform. This helps align everyone around a common data source to improve collaboration.
Utilizing an iterative approach, SubmissionIQ can deliver workflow efficiencies for users within 1-2 months, and full integration within 3-4 months. https://insurancequantified.com/submissioniq/
Zurich Exporter Solutions Digital Platform
Team/Product
Zurich Exporter Solutions Digital Platform (ESDP) enables businesses to quickly secure appropriate international coverage for products or people going overseas. Many middle market companies with little experience in international operations don’t know they need a specific international insurance policy for overseas employees or international shipments. In the past, this could lead to situations where a risk manager had little notice about the planned travel and shipping, forcing them to contact a broker to secure coverage in a mutually stressful transaction.
With ESDP, it takes just 15 minutes to issue a policy after data entry. ESDP offers broad eligibility: policies are available for over 320 SIC codes, can last for up to three years, and can include numerous types of coverage. For risks falling outside the platform parameters, the system automatically routes to an underwriter for review. https://www.zurichna.com/
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