An Interview with Pranav Pasricha, Intellect SEEC CEO ‘We’re Pioneering Deployment of AI Big Data and IoT to Transform Insurance’

“We built big data and AI into each and every product, and continue to expand how they are applied to drive autonomous insurance.”

The insurance industry today is struggling on many fronts – to innovate and quickly launch new products and customer engagement models, to reduce its expense ratio, to improve its risk analysis and predictive underwriting to name a few. Most of these issues eventually boil down to the rather rigid and inflexible core systems that the industry has been built on. Traditional systems are hard to change, expensive to run, cannot be easily upgraded and cannot leverage big data, AI/ML and IoT or other contemporary technologies that drive the new economy.

In light of the above-mentioned scenario, we are thrilled to present Intellect SEEC – one of the world’s leading providers of insurance software with an extensive portfolio covering distribution, underwriting and claims. The company provides innovative insurance solutions to lower operating costs and increase premium volumes and margins.

Intellect SEEC was incorporated in 2014 and is headquartered in New York. It has additional office locations in New Jersey, Toronto, London, Paris, Madrid, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.

Pranav Pasricha, Intellect SEEC CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Tell us about Intellect SEEC.

Intellect SEEC leverages next-generation technologies to solve complex insurance problems and create intelligent solutions that deliver results.

We have been working with insurers across the globe for over 20 years delivering value through core systems. However, we still consider ourselves as challengers. We work with established industry players and game changers alike to achieve a confluence of purpose and capabilities that questions the status quo and delivers exponential results to our network of stakeholders. Insurance is complex, but our solutions leverage big data, Al and conversational technologies to make it intuitive, engaging and insightful.

We have the vision of working with our clients and partners to deliver intelligent software that redefines insurance with speed, simplicity and sheer grit.

Brief us on the journey of the company from its inception till date.

Intellect SEEC has been in existence for over two decades, as mentioned above, initially offering legacy reverse engineering products in the pre-Y2K era. The company became highly successful in offering a solution for insurers to understand and decipher the complex code in their legacy systems. Post Y2K, the company built on that proposition with a ‘lego bricks’ approach to software that enabled carriers to externalize services from legacy systems on to internet portals. Since then, the company has led every successive wave of technology deployment in insurance that includes building omnichannel mobile solutions, cloud-native platforms and now, big data and ML-based systems.

Please help us understand the current market landscape?

Insurance and its related technology market are evolving faster than ever before, largely enabled by possibilities of new technology. Technologies like AI/ML, big data, drones, ubiquitous mobility and IoT are not just changing customer expectations and engagement with insurers, but are opening possibilities of entirely new business models that were not possible before. In parallel, an oversupply of capital in the global markets means that all the players in the insurance chain (agents, carriers, reinsurers) are trying to expand out of their historic positions and improvise their business models.

On the technology side, there is a significant influx of investment capital into insurtech companies. VCs are very actively funding new startups, traditional companies are reinventing their technology stacks and a lot of carriers are actively partnering with established and new companies alike to bring in new operating models.

What are the differentiating factors that set your company apart from its competitors?

Intellect SEEC made a bold decision in 2014 to sunset its entire technology stack and rebuild the entire product library again from the ground up in contemporary technologies. From that point (four years ago), technology has moved significantly and we have been nimble to evolve our stack as the technology market evolves. Most established companies, with a significant sunk investment, struggle to innovate because it cannibalizes their base, they often do not have the skills that differentiate them enough in the new technology and they are too focused on maintaining status quo.

On the contrary, our philosophy is to be the exponential growth leader in insurance. Having rebuilt on cloud-native technology and being born again in the AI and big data age, dealing with change is much easier for us. We have not just rebuilt the technology of our company, but also our skill sets, operations and most importantly, culture. We model our business after companies like Google, Facebook and Netflix, and not a typical financial services company or a traditional enterprise technology company.

Our products have the following differentiating features:

• We built all our products across all lines of business on a common insurtech platform that is cloud-native. This means that we or our customers can build new functionalities very quickly and have interoperability across all businesses and geographies.
• We built big data and AI into each and every product, and continue to expand how they are applied to drive autonomous insurance. For instance, we now use external big data to enrich financial advisor conversations and do contextual-conversational distribution (aka no forms, ask less yet know more and deliver more suitable advise). Likewise, our underwriting systems can source data from thousands of sources about a risk and can make complex underwriting decisions using ML.
• Our leadership team comes with extensive experience from inside the insurance industry. We understand not just technology, but also the domain and its challenges, and know how to make a real business impact in the real-life insurance world.

What are the products and services offered by Intellect SEEC?

Intellect Risk Analyst: Intellect Risk Analyst is the most advanced underwriting risk assessment tool in the industry. It is designed to give underwriters a holistic understanding across all dimensions that really matter in commercial insurance. Besides covering past history and facts relevant to a case, the tool provides leading indicators of potentially adverse events in the future. The end result is a better-informed, complete and detailed assessment of risk that delivers dramatic improvement to the underwriting loss ratio. It applies highly advanced AI, ML and line-of-business-specific underwriting rules and risk predictors to thousands of data sources. The result is a highly intuitive and interactive dashboard that summarizes everything an underwriter, analyst, actuary or an agent needs to know about a risk within minutes.

Intellect Xponent: Intellect Xponent is an AI-based automated underwriting solution designed for commercial P&C insurance. It is proven to not just automate processes and bring cost efficiency, but also improve quality of decision-making through AI and big data and have tangible loss ratio impact.

The product provides underwriters, experts and brokers the necessary information to properly assess risk. Xponent has three portals that enable underwriters, producers and experts to build complete risk profiles, obtain a 360-degree view of their accounts, deliver faster service to brokers, integrate with third-parties and enable collaboration.

Intellect Botworks: Intellect Botworks is a unified platform for building and rapidly deploying AI-based bots across the enterprise – both conversational for human engagement as well as process bots. Botworks helps insurers leverage a common domain training set for all their enterprise needs and also leverages a common set of internal and external data connectors for a rich contextual experience. It contains a common set of microservices for transaction enablement with the core systems, saving large carriers significant time and money in their engagement and automation journey.

Intellect Distribution and Service Suite (DSS) 3.0: DSS is a comprehensive distribution suite that delivers exponential results across new business and servicing operations for the advisor, customer service representative and direct-to-customer channels. With this AI-powered platform, advisors, contact center representatives and customers can engage and transact seamlessly across devices in real time. It eliminates paperwork, boosts advisor productivity, reduces operational costs and empowers the customer with capabilities anytime, anywhere.

Who are some of your biggest clients? In which vertical do you see the most traction in?

We have some of the biggest carriers on the planet as our customers as well as some very small community-based insurers. We are proud to serve each one of them.

At the moment, we are seeing traction in all lines of business, but the focus areas are slightly different. In P&C lines, we see a lot of focus on sharper risk assessment and underwriting by application of IoT, telematics, big data, ML and other such technologies. Carriers are reimagining products with concepts such as UBI (Usage-based Insurance) and parametric policies. There is a significant effort to reduce the intricacy of buying complex commercial products and online distribution for SME classes.

In life insurance, we are seeing a lot of traction in digital advice, increasing penetration of D2C channels and an interest in wellness:

StarStone Named Celent Model Insurer of the Year 2017

StarStone, the global specialty insurer was named the Model Insurer of 2017 by the industry analyst, Celent in the Data Mastery and Analytics category. Celent recognized the insurer’s exponential leap in using AI through the Intellect Risk Analyst platform to materially reduce loss ratios and improve profitability across key portfolios.

AWS and Intellect SEEC – A Winning Partnership

In 2017, AWS profiled Intellect SEEC as a standard bearer of cloud products and solutions in insurance. We provide easily available cloud-based applications at a low cost to our customers.

Even small to mid-sized insurers who have previously not had the same level of enterprise IT infrastructure as larger companies can now access advanced technology as a service.

Using Amazon Web Services, we have been able to reduce IT costs by 60 percent and IT management time by 85 percent for our clients.

Intellect SEEC Sets a New Benchmark in Insurance Digital Transformation

In less than 9 months, we enabled one of the world’s largest insurers to go live with their full-scale digital transformation project.

The insurer’s iOS and Android Apps report; statistics gathered between December 2017 and February 2018:

• Over one million combined downloads on App Store and Play Store in the first five months
• 2 average rating across iOS and Android apps
• 4 million Transactions

What is the roadmap ahead?

The roadmap for a company like us is always exciting. We are on an endless journey of learning in the proverbial sense, but also in a machine learning sense! In the foreseeable future, we will continue to enrich our data platform to make it the world’s largest source of unstructured data for insurance and increase its veracity and velocity, so insurance companies can reliably use big data for crucial complex decision making.

We are also actively expanding our AI-based algorithms to ensure we can make constantly better decisions for complex commercial risks.

We are expanding the scope of our platform to deploy various use cases of IoT, image feature recognition and video feature extraction.

Our Botworks platform is starting to gain significant traction in the marketplace and that is another exciting area of growth for us.

Testimonials: Elevating Customer Relationship

“Intellect SEEC was an easy choice for us because their suite allows KSKJ Life to bring forth the technology advancements we need to keep us competitive and enable business growth. We are giving our agents tools that not only help them sell but also provide key insights for deeper engagement with our members.”

– Tony Mravle Jr., CEO of KSKJ Life

“The Intellect Risk Analyst initiative very quickly improved our view of risk, risk selection and efficiency; leading to anticipated increases in underwriting profit. I would like to thank our team and Intellect SEEC for their dedication to this initiative. We are only just scratching the surface in terms of what this technology can do for our business in the future.”

– Norman Brown, CEO of StarStone US

Pranav Pasricha: A Brief Background

Pranav Pasricha is the CEO of  Intellect SEEC and a pioneer in deploying AI, big data and IoT technologies in the insurance industry.  Pranav is a widely recognized thought leader, widely published in prestigious publications and sought-after speaker at industry events. Under his leadership, Intellect SEEC is creating the singular insurtech marrying cloud-native software with big data and ML – to make complex autonomous decisions for insurance a reality.

“Intellect SEEC leverages next-generation technologies to solve complex insurance problems and create intelligent solutions that deliver results.”