Bitesize InsurTech: getmeins
October 12, 2018 Greg Brown
getmeIns analyses images to detect and reduce ‘soft’ fraud in motor insurance.
Founder Eugene Greenberg points to a report by Aviva Canada that found that 57% of claims were exaggerated or in some other way misrepresented. He adds that ‘soft’ fraud is often overlooked in claims statistics.
getmeIns – which founded under the brand Click-Ins – analyses a single photo of the reported damage to assess whether the claim is genuine. The ‘digital fingerprint’ is compared to a baseline constructed from three possible sources:
- Historic data (images and other) held by insurance companies
- Images collected at the point of underwriting
- Photos from the point of accident
This aim is to reduce insurance fraud and ultimately increase profitability for insurers.
The company is based in Israel and is led by a team of ex-military officers with experience spanning insurance, technology and intelligence.
In 2017, getmeIns was one of two winners of an InsurTech competition in Israel run by AXA and JVP, a local venture capital fund. The winners are reported to have received $1m each, although the details of this funding round are undisclosed. The company was placed second runner up in the Fintech Awards Luxembourg. This year they were chosen to be included in the first batch of Plug and Play’s Munich InsurTech accelerator program (along with Impact 25 members Digital Fineprint, Shift Technology, INSTANDA and RightIndem). They were also recently announced as part of the fifth batch of Plug and Play in California.
getmeIns is currently carrying out proof of concepts with one of the biggest claim settlement companies in Europe, as well as insurers in Canada and China.
The Oxbow Partners view
Fraud detection is a hot cluster in InsurTech. Four Impact 25 Members are active in the space:
- Cognotekt (Bitesize) helps insurers automate claims processes and compares loss estimates against benchmarks
- FRISS (report two pager) uses AI and machine learning techniques to assign a ‘FRISS score’ to quotes and claims based on their fraud propensity
- Shift Technology (Bitesize) uses AI to scan for claims fraud
- Tractable (Bitesize) helps insurers estimate losses from images of accidents, thereby flagging up any suspiciously large claims
All of these businesses have a slightly different angle on the same problem. Insurers need to work out which combination of suppliers leads to the optimal cost/benefit.
Fraud management is an increasingly important competitive differentiator for insurers as customer relationships become more digital and therefore less personal. In Britain, whiplash claims are close to a national sport, and identifying them is important for insurers. It is estimated that fraudulent claims add £50 to the cost of any motor insurance policy.
One challenge for insurers is, however, that much fraud is moving from first party to third party. As insurers get better at weeding out poor risks at the point of underwriting, the incidence of fraud in their own customer base reduces. Instead, fraud occurs by third parties, for example staged accidents and supplier fraud.
Oxbow Partners has worked extensively with insurers on fraud topics, including:
- Helping a motor insurer build a better claims customer experience, leading to lower operational costs and indemnity spend
- Helping a specialty insurer build business cases for a new claims operating model
Please get in touch if you would like to realise savings in your claims function.
