Intellect SEEC is an established, listed company with the heart and soul of a startup. With three decades of experience, Intellect SEEC is a prime example of a firm that is on a path to transforming the insurance industry. Their business tackles some of the biggest challenges in underwriting by leveraging next-generation technologies such as Cloud, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Internet of Things (IoT).

Steered by Pranav Pasricha - Chief Executive Officer and Lakshan De Silva - Chief Technology Officer, Intellect SEEC’s vision is to make insurance about the insured. The leadership team strongly believes that the insurance industry should not charge customers any more than a bank or investment manager would to manage people’s money – effectively translating to the reduction in the expenses of a typical insurer by around 70 to 80%. “Insurance products should be easy to understand, customized for the individual policyholder, and provide immediacy of buy and service. These are all basic things that the industry is far from achieving even in today’s digital age,” elucidates Pasricha.

Intellect SEEC initially offered solutions to help insurers understand and decode complex legacy systems. From there, it enabled clients to progress from using these obsolete systems to employing internet portals. While the company has been around for over 30 years, in 2014, it reconstructed its entire technology stack to go cloud-native and built ML/AI-based systems. “We believe that while the underlying business of insurance is complex, leading-edge technology should be deployed without interruption, making the user experience simple and seamless,” states De Silva.

Understanding The Ground Reality

The insurance market is evolving faster than ever before. This is made possible by the active adoption of new and emerging technologies. These technologies are opening up entirely new business possibilities besides enhancing client engagement and improving customer experience. AI and big data have extensively changed businesses and people’s daily lives, and they will continue to drive transformation. “We firmly believe it will be a revolution as big as the invention of the Internet itself. When you add in developing areas of IoT and Augmented/Mixed Reality, the impact on humans and the ability of businesses to develop new models, the human-to-machine interaction will change even more,” conveys Pasricha.

Throughout the history of technology, humans have always developed deterministic software programs. However, in the current market scenario, software can learn itself and draw inference from raw data without human intervention, thereby changing the technology landscape dramatically.

Customers have always been skeptical of new technologies, especially those that seem to be intrusive. However, people are beginning to get comfortable with these new technologies as they realize the benefits and convenience that they provide. “As long as technology companies ensure their privacy controls are in place, the ease and benefit that financial services companies will be able to extend to their customers will far outweigh any concerns, and new business models will become the default,” asserts De Silva. Today however, there is some hesitance amongst customers in adopting usage-based insurance. Intellect SEEC hopes to change this by ensuring that the ‘safety first’ aspects of such technology are seen as a positive. Only then will these usage-based or progressive insurance policies become widely adopted. 

Unveiling Products and Services that Enhance Business Excellence 

With a vision to redefine insurance, Intellect SEEC partnered with leading insurers to create solutions using exponential technologies. The firm is focused on making a material difference in the way commercial risks are underwritten. This focus allows them to invest in technology solutions that materially improve the carrier-broker interaction, enrich risk information for a more holistic look at the risks submitted and intelligent workflows that balance the underwriting expense in a way that results in consistent and profitable decisions. The firm’s product portfolio consists of the following:

Intellect Xponent - Intellect Xponent is an AI and analytics-based underwriting workstation that is revolutionizing the way commercial lines are underwritten. By using advanced exponential technologies, it provides underwriters with a highly configurable and intelligent underwriting process management solution. Underwriters, brokers, and experts can exchange information in real time. Agents can quickly and painlessly retrieve the status of applications, and the overall processing turnaround time is drastically reduced.

Xponent offers the capability for intake, risk analysis, underwriting, and policy life-cycle management all in one next generation system. “With Intellect Xponent, user groups are assigned work based on pre-built work management algorithms. The automated underwriting feature makes sure that simple and complex cases go to the right people at the right time,” describes Pasricha.

Intellect Risk Analyst – The world of risk analysis is “smarter” and more comprehensive, therefore, Intellect Risk Analyst gives underwriters the ability to make informed decisions. Risk Analyst aggregates lots of data from over 3,000+ sources, both structured and unstructured, internal and external. Then it goes to work analyzing all of the data and creates meaningful insights using the power of big data, AI, risk predictors, and underwriting rules. The result is a report that can uncover 10 times the risk information in 1/10^th the time. Risk Analyst is the only AI-based risk discovery and assessment tool for the commercial insurance industry and it gives users the ability to make the right decisions in the shortest amount of time.

Empowering Businesses with Disruptive Software

Since 2014 when Intellect SEEC restructured its entire technology stack, the firm continues to actively evolve its technology landscape as the insurance market grows and changes. Intellect is creating a ‘full stack’ insurance data, analytics, and software ecosystem to achieve its mission of autonomous Insurance. “We pretty much are like the revolution in automobiles moving from human-driven cars to autonomous electric vehicles. Just like you cannot fire up an electric vehicle on gasoline, similarly, to achieve their full potential, ML-based systems need high-dimensional big data, cognitive process automation requires context and learning algorithms, while analytics needs predictive data elements,” explains Pasricha. 

Intellect SEEC’s software is built on the latest cloud-native technologies that are robust and easy to deploy. Not only are these platforms highly customizable, they also guarantee swift software upgrades. The company is also taking measures to:

• Solve the full front-end transformation of commercial insurance including broker collaboration
• Create no fill/low fill UI
• Improve data quality
• Achieve the ‘ask less but know more’ vision
• Produce AI-powered underwriting and rating algorithms and software

“Many people in the industry today talk about taking a platform approach to insurance software, but in fact, most such pitches are a patchwork of different underlying software systems – which doesn’t work. There is no other vendor that we know of that has built a complete ecosystem from the ground up in contemporary technology that covers data, analytics, and software,” expresses De Silva. Intellect SEEC has unique and comprehensive solutions that will take a long time for any other firm to catch up. “We continue to spend very heavily in R&D to maintain the growth of our platform in all respects – functional coverage, data breadth and veracity, and ML models. For us, this a journey that never ends – we will continue moving!” affirms Pasricha.  

Recognizing a Business that’s Redefining the Future of Insurance

Over the last two years, Intellect SEEC has been extensively known in the InsurTech industry by winning several accolades. Below is the complete list of awards received for its significant state-of-the-art products and services, ground-breaking ideas, and widely-recognized thought leadership.

2017

• Golden Bridges Award: Pranav Pasricha, Bronze Winner for ‘Executive of the Year in the IT Software Category’
• Golden Bridges Award: Intellect Risk Analyst Gold Winner for ‘Innovation in the Technology Category’
• SMA Innovation in Action Award: Intellect Risk Analyst - Winner in the ‘Vendor Category’
• Celent Model Insurer Award: StarStone named a ‘Celent Model Insurer in the Data Mastery and Analytics Category’ for using Artificial Intelligence through Risk Analyst
• Best in Biz Award: Intellect Risk Analyst Silver Winner in the ‘Enterprise Product of the Year – All Other Software Category’

2018

• Women in IT Award: Laila Beane named a finalist
• American Business Award: Intellect Risk Analyst Winner of the ‘Silver Stevie® Award in New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Big Data Solution Category’
• Life Insurance International Awards: Intellect Distribution and Service Suite presented with ‘Digital Innovation of the Year Award’  

Driving Change and Delivering Value in the Digital Journey of Customers

Intellect SEEC’s clientele includes some of the biggest carriers as well as small, community-based global insurers. While the firm is witnessing growing traction in all lines of work, the focus areas for each differ slightly. Irrespective of the business vertical, Intellect SEEC’s innovative approach to insurance provides customers with the opportunity to generate maximum value for their undertakings. Additionally, these incredible products and services are easy to operate and sustain. With such an array of highly optimized solutions, Intellect SEEC has assisted many of their clients to effectively deal with the complexities and intricacies of today’s insurance industry. 

One such client includes StarStone Insurance, a specialty insurer that provides a diversified range of casualty, property and specialty insurance to customers worldwide. The client wanted to evaluate how to improve several areas of their business, such as: decision-making, understanding the risks being written, developing accurate risk profiles to validate agent submission data, and increasing agent collaboration and visibility. StarStone worked with Intellect SEEC who introduced a set of creative underwriting criteria. The whole solution was delivered in just two months, and StarStone experienced a variety of benefits. Their underwriting decision-making time decreased by 70%, while the cost of reports from premium data sources reduced by 40%. In addition, with the help of the Intellect Risk Analyst platform, the client was able to identify two out of 30 accounts to be declined which would have otherwise resulted in claims of up to $6.5 million. Celent, the analyst firm, also recognized these outstanding results and awarded StarStone as ‘Model Insurer of 2017’.

In another compelling case, Intellect SEEC helped one of its clients achieve exponential growth by powering their underwriting. The client was a leading U.S. Property and Casualty carrier operating in 50 states, with comprehensive commercial insurance products for construction, manufacturing, and healthcare. The client was facing multiple challenges with their existing underwriting process that spanned several different tools, as well as lack of a 360-degree account view, and time spent on low-value tasks such as data gathering. The carrier was using multiple spreadsheets, a relatively modern policy admin, data warehouse, and workflow system, resulting in a significant loss in productivity for the underwriters. By leveraging Intellect Xponent, the client’s underwriting decision-making time was reduced by 60%. Additionally, the client was able to lower the costs of accessing new third-party data sources and initiate premium growth plans for new classes and market segments.

Paving the Way for Bold Ideas to Transform the Traditional Insurance Landscape

In an ever-evolving and complex digital setting, it is imperative that insurers remain aware and open to improvement of their InsurTech strategies. Long-term customer loyalty, increased profits, and reduced operational inefficiencies can be achieved only with the deployment and implementation of new technologies. Even though Intellect SEEC has been delivering value through its core systems for over 20 years, it still considers itself as challengers that have embarked on a journey of constant learning. “We will work relentlessly with established industry players and game changers alike, to achieve a confluence of purpose and capabilities that deliver exponential results to our network of stakeholders. Insurance may be multi-faceted, but our solutions make it intuitive, engaging, and insightful,” says Pasricha.

Intellect SEEC intends to innovate and challenge the status quo as it enables newer business models. A key area of growth will be the expansion of its big data platform for the industry that is far more reliable than user-submitted data. This platform will help facilitate clients in crucial decision making. “We will lead the creation of predictive analytics in the industry for a whole range of use cases outside of our current focus area of commercial underwriting,” expresses De Silva. Intellect SEEC also hopes to extend the use of new functional applications such as IoT, image recognition and video extraction across the insurance value chain. To conclude, Pasricha states, “Stay tuned, our future is exciting!”