‘Resolutely Customer-Centric’: Global InsurTech Pioneer—Intellect SEEC—is a Future-Ready Digital Modernization and Technology Transformation Partner for Commercial Line Carriers

“Our solutions reduce intake cost, improve data quality, increase bind ratio, improve underwriter efficiency and reduce loss ratios.”

Intellect SEEC is the InsurTech backed by Intellect Design Arena, a global leader in financial technology for banking, insurance, and other financial services. A uniquely focused Products business, Intellect addresses the needs of financial institutions in varying stages of technology adoption.

With over a decade of continuous and significant research and development investment, the Intellect suite is the largest in the industry. The company serves over 250 financial institutions across 30 countries.

Intellect SEEC’s North American headquarters are located in New Jersey, with global offices in UK, Europe, India and Australia.

To highlight and further understand what Intellect SEEC stands for and seeks to explore in this segment, I sat down with Jim McKenney, Chief Strategy Officer, who is the company’s Products Business Head and Laila Beane, Chief Customer Officer.

Below is an excerpt.

Tell us what inspired the creation of Intellect SEEC.

Our parent company, Intellect Design Arena, is a global leader in banking and financial services. Intellect SEEC has quickly become an insurtech leader globally, building out capabilities for commercial insurance in the North American market, wealth management transformation in the UK market, Life insurance for APAC, and data services for Australian general insurance. One of our largest cloud deployments has been in APAC for Life solutions with over four million transactions processed per day. We are currently expanding our presence in UK and Europe. The design of our AI models allows us to reuse and quickly deploy capabilities to our new verticals such as retail and government.

Keeping the focus in North America, we have delivered powerful underwriting outcomes by taking a design thinking approach for a simple user experience powered by cloud-native sophisticated AI/ML technologies. Our suite of solutions is designed to reduce intake cost and triage, improve submission data quality and footprint, ensure a high bind ratio, improve underwriter efficiency and reduce loss ratios. Along with our suite of AI solutions, we are a digital modernization and technology transformation partner for commercial line carriers.

Q. What makes Intellect SEEC great? And how does the company solve complex insurance problems and create intelligent solutions?

Our combination of proven AI solutions, a center of excellence in Salesforce, and agile technology modernization resources allows us to quickly and efficiently solve the problems of our customers. This allows them to work smarter and accelerate the role of advanced technologies in modernizing commercial insurance, an industry where there has been significant under-investment in technology. We are continuously releasing new IP to better contextualize risks in commercial lines for small, mid, and large commercials. We also offer transformation accelerators to enable quicker ROI for clients with their parallel modernization priorities.

Our solutions are domain trained with sophisticated machine learning techniques intrinsic to them. Magic Submission allows for automated submission ingestion, intelligent extraction by use case, data validation and enrichment from third party sources and dynamic rules. It performs clearance, triage and prioritizes submissions with scores, and automatically routes. An industry first is the reverse engineering algorithms of free text descriptions to industry standard location level NAICS, ISO, ATC, and RMS; the solution’s underlying ML feedback captures user interaction for continuous learning. Risk Analyst provides accurate risk insights triangulated from thousands of sources with layers of proprietary algorithms for ensuring the highest accuracy of information. Common use is for prospecting, new business, and renewals. Xponent, our underwriter workbench, provides a ‘single pane of glass’ for the underwriter across lines of business, with account 360 dashboard (internal and external data curated) and underwriter decision thoughts capture.

Q. Intellect SEEC works with established industry players and game-changers to achieve a confluence of purpose and capabilities. Splendid! How have these partnerships helped your clients solve their complex problems?

It seems our differentiator is that we are commercial lines use case driven. We are a team of commercial lines experts and our products have been built specifically to solve problems for commercial/general insurance.

Our partnerships with 100+ third-party data providers and leading technology providers, like AWS, Salesforce, and Snowflake allow us to offer our customers the best resources and strategies to focus on the right accounts and accelerate their digital modernization. Furthermore, we partner with our clients in effective change management for organizational effectiveness in these new AI models.

As a result of our solutions and transformation approach, our customers have experienced:

• Intake triage cost reduced by 70% and speed to process improved by 87%
• Ability to free up and upskill 80% of intake resources
• Submission data quality improved by 27% and the data fill rate increased to 97%
• Technology and AI/ML model reuse across lines of business up to 70%
• Underwriter time to decision reduced by 60% and underwriting quality improved by 50%
• Identified 38% of nearly 12,000 new business prospects as ‘high interest’ to focus sales efforts
• Loss ratios improved by 2% in the first year and another client identified and declined a submission with alerts to a potential 6m claim

The most important intangible benefits the carrier sees is the intrinsic machine learning models that can provide user behavior feedback and new scenario handling feedback for continuous learning.

We accelerate parallel transformation initiatives such as ‘single source of truth for customer CRM,’ data intelligence (data sciences) for a competitive edge, and enterprise integration acceleration. We offer our Salesforce Center of Excellence of 120+ certified professionals, and agile tech teams comprising of data scientists, data analysts, full-stack developers, integration specialists, testers, automation engineers, data migration experts, cloud migration experts, and transformation consultants.

These strategic technology partnerships bring further value for scale and reliability such as 100+ successful Salesforce releases and one of Europe’s largest data migrations.

Q. I find it unique that an organization has what it takes to continue to deliver value over the years. My question to you is, how did your company continue to adapt? Can you provide us with some insights on how you approach your product roadmaps?

We quickly realized that to remain relevant, we need to leverage our core strengths and be agile in everything we do. It is not just about offering an off-the-shelf solution, but it’s about establishing a strategic partnership with our customers, to solve for the long term that ensures overall growth and ROI while lowering technology debt. Data is the heart of everything. We are that modernization partner for carriers who transform      data using emerging technologies and deep domain expertise to find inefficiencies, solve for them and reinvest that savings to become more sophisticated.

Our clients and industry trends drive our product(s) roadmap. Additionally, we are engaged with analysts to understand the market dynamics across various geos, as some of our customers are global. As an example of our current work, one of our commercial lines customers wants speed to market for a new product with new technologies for the end-to-end underwriting process. We are essentially transforming the archaic front-end exercise of intake and routing into an intelligently automated process that will reduce cost, add big data and technology sophistication, reduce turnaround time and identify high bind opportunities upfront. Part of the reason why this is working so successfully for the customer is our knowledge and experience in commercial insurance. Our leadership team, product teams, and business development teams are subject matter experts and can quickly roll out new products for our customers with the highest technology reuse.

Q. From your perspective, how is the industry you serve currently evolving?

The pandemic and the developments of the past 18 months have caused underinvestment in commercial insurance transformation and there is room for increased investment in this space. Furthermore,     

• underwriting is required to increase the profitability and ensure the book of business sustenance
• investments have been reprioritized to focus on data security, cyber and fraud
• new entrant workforce requires a different working model (immediacy; ease; rewards)
• new and emerging risks are affecting underwriting, rating and product models
• new and emerging data types and technologies are disrupting the carrier ecosystem
• M&A activity, and InsurTech partnerships are being sought for innovative exploration and competitive gains
• organizational changes are prevalent as AI initiatives become more mainstay

Q. What is your final message to The Silicon Review readers, and to your current and future clients and partners?

We are committed to continuing to develop AI solutions, release new IP (data, AI/ML models), and partner with our customers to find inefficiencies in their business, solve for these inefficiencies, and reinvest to become more sophisticated.

Besides, we aim to partner with our clients by enabling them with ‘Information age’ technology and AI capabilities so that they can achieve significantly superior end customer experience and resulting business outcomes.

Leadership | Intellect SEEC

Jim McKenney, CSO & Products Business Head: Jim is an experienced insurance executive, spending 18+ years in various roles for Liberty Mutual Insurance. Most recently, Jim led Liberty's Product and Underwriting organization for the mid and large commercial segment. Prior roles include experience in small commercial underwriting segments and various finance roles. Jim is a certified public accountant and graduated from the University of MA Amherst. 

In his role at Intellect SEEC, he provides product innovation, drives business strategy, and expands partnerships for achieving revenue growth. LinkedIn

Laila Beane, CCO & Head of Consulting: Laila is an InsurTech thought leader and a highly accomplished individual with 20+ years of experience. She has held various leadership positions in the manufacturing and insurance sectors including Motorola, ACORD and Allstate. Laila has successfully led multi million dollar digital transformation strategies and has been a speaker and panelist at numerous insurance industry events. Her articles have been published in Insurance Thought Leadership and other media. She graduated from University Of Illinois with her Masters Degree in Computer Science. LinkedIn

Banesh Prabhu, CEO: Banesh is a Fintech services veteran and pioneer in Technology & Operations management, having developed and implemented global strategies for executing digital capabilities and servicing of clients. He has managed senior global responsibilities in Operations and Technology for over 33 years, of which 23 years were in Citibank where he was responsible for servicing clients in 55+ international markets.

In his role as CEO at Intellect SEEC, his focus is on the Insurtech Digital Transformation capabilities that are built using AI and data in a Saas cloud based consumption model to help clients achieve significant business outcomes that the Information Age has created. LinkedIn

"Our partnerships with 100+ third-party data providers and leading technology providers, like AWS, Salesforce, and Snowflake allow us to offer our customers the best resources and strategies to focus on the right accounts and accelerate their digital modernization.”