Bitesize InsurTech: Ohalo
March 13, 2020 Chris Sandilands
Ohalo helps organisations manage their data for regulatory and strategic purposes with its Data X-Ray tool.
GDPR requires organisations to erase all personal data on a customer if requested. However, that data could be stored in multiple databases, documents and spreadsheets. Ohalo’s Data X-Ray tool helps organisations quickly search for individuals’ data across large datasets and redact unstructured data at scale.
The solution works by classifying and mapping data using customised machine learning algorithms to identify where personal and commercially sensitive information lies. The solution can look across a range of data types from an unstructured Word document to an on-premise legacy SQL database.
The tool’s differentiating twist is that it also helps companies to automatically redact defined datapoints from large unstructured datasets. This feature allows identifiable personal data to be removed, for example, from subject access request (SAR) responses and database extracts for data science use cases.
The speed is impressive: in one example, Ohalo was able to redact personal information from 600,000 documents in one day following implementation, a task which would have taken 12.5 years for a person to complete.
Founded in 2017, Ohalo predominantly operates in Europe and targets B2C businesses and organisations with large volumes of customer data. Previous clients have varied from telecoms companies to government organisations.
The company also has partnerships with insurance players and use cases are not always strictly regulatory. For example, a large insurer wanted to ensure that SME portfolio data was consistent between business divisions. Ohalo implemented a solution to track differences between datasets and deliver the benefits of a centralised database while maintaining decentralised policy admin systems.
The Oxbow Partners view
We have a penchant for boring but useful technology businesses. Whilst analysts’ focus is often on the “shiny new things”, much of the value – in the short term, at least – will be driven by businesses like Ohalo. Ohalo fits this mould precisely – a neat proposition that allows insurers to fulfil their regulatory requirements but also has some useful ancillary use cases that address some of the main issues driven by legacy technology.
