Bitesize InsurTech: Atidot
June 30, 2017 George Hanks
Atidot is a startup that helps life insurers generate better customer insight from data.
This Israeli SaaS platform was founded in 2016 by Dror Katzav, Barak Bercovitz and Assaf Mizan, variously former members of the Israeli Army Intelligence Corp and former Chief Actuary at the Israeli Ministry of Finance. The platform went live in March this year.
We understand that Atidot are transitioning from proof of concept (POC) to production with two carriers, and that ongoing POCs include one with a top 10 US life insurer.
What problem are they solving?
Atidot claim that life insurers do not use 80% of the data that they collect for strategic decision-making. This is because a) data is often stored in multiple formats across multiple systems, requiring significant data cleansing before it can be modelled and b) traditional modelling tools are hard work, requiring substantial manual effort.
Atidot’s system extracts data from insurers’ legacy systems, and then cleans and organises it. The team can then add external data to enrich the dataset. They then apply AI, machine learning and actuarial modelling techniques to extract the insight.
Atidot told us that a recent POC demonstrated that their models were 14% more accurate at predicting customer lapses than the carrier’s traditional analysis.
The Oxbow Partners view
This business is quite similar to Emerge Analytics, which we featured back in March. We agree with the premise of the use case.
Few would disagree that data and analytics are an important component of the future of insurance. But we have two observations:
- A senior executive from the retail industry was recently shocked by the news that data-based businesses like insurers didn’t typically have a data specialist on their Board (for example in a non-executive capacity). He could not believe that an industry that relied so heavily on data did not have this expertise at the top of the house. Insurers need to make sure that they are giving data the priority it requires at the right level.
- More broadly, the data and analytics environment is about to become more challenging in Europe thanks to the GDPR, a piece of European Regulation, that governs the use of data. We published a guest blog on the GDPR back in April. Insurers need to ensure that their corporate data infrastructure is set-up in such a way that they can use these sophisticated analytics techniques in a compliant way.
