Insurtech Firms Attack Life Admin Monsters
Atidot promises to tend to orphaned life policies. Ushur alleges that it can tame email.
Two startups — Atidot Software Ltd. and Ushur Inc. — are trying this year’s hot insurtech strategy: Solving narrow, but terrible, problems for life insurers.
Atidot is offering to help life insurers manage orphaned policies and reassign them to agents.
Ushur says it can use artificial intelligence to help life insurers sort and manage customer email.
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Dror Katzev, chief executive officer of the Tel Aviv-based company, says in a statement about the Policy Reassignment Management system that orphaned policies account for about 30% of a typical life insurer’s book of business.
Efforts to reassign orphaned policies may cause about 15% of the policies to lapse, Katzev says.
“We are transforming an unavoidable high-risk interaction point into a highly beneficial one, ensuring that orphaned policies get assigned to the best agent to service and update the policy,” Katzev says.
The other narrowly focused startup, Ushur, says its new SmartMail system can go through huge amounts of bulk customer email and attachments quickly.
Ushur estimates life insurers spend an average of $3.28 per email on triaging and sorting incoming customer email.
“With thousands of emails arriving in bulk to inboxes each month, maintaining staffing levels necessary to ensure timely processing is costly,” Ushur says. “The manual process of reviewing email content and attachments, determining purpose and forwarding to the appropriate team is highly inefficient, and it requires an army of staff that could be better utilized on more business-critical tasks.”
Ushur says its new system has unique strategies for extracting data out of email and classifying the information in the email.
The system can also respond to simple emails itself. When the system knows what it needs to do, but it’s missing important information, such as a birth date or an account number, it can ask the customer for more information, Ushur says.
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