Bitesize InsurTech: Zelros
November 4, 2021 Hélène Miravalls
Zelros is a B2B independent software vendor providing AI to the insurance and bancassurance markets, mainly targeting personal lines property and casualty (P&C), health and life products.
Founded in France in 2016, Zelros has displayed strong growth and now works with leading insurers like MAIF, Baloise, AssureOne Group. The company has accumulated funding of $16.5m over two rounds to extend its reach to Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and North America.
The solution enables insurance distributors to enrich their customer experience management across all channels by driving smarter engagements with policyholders. In 2020 alone it reviewed more than 20 million insurance policies, generating over two million real-time personalised recommendations to then up-sell and cross-sell products.
Zelros does this by providing a framework for ingesting and analysing mountains of data generated by different insurance products, both structured (e.g. claims, quotes, underwriting documents) and unstructured data (e.g. voice/email communications). It does so in three distinct ways:
1. Customising sales flow
Tapping into natural language processing technology, the “Voice2Insights” feature captures insights from conversations between policyholders and their insurance agent, allowing agents to surface contextualised recommendations instantly to meet the specific needs of customers.
Simultaneously, a separate algorithm will prioritise and suggest products to the agent based on business priorities such as revenue, number of subscriptions, and product mix, by running simulations and A/B tests to analyse the impact of new recommendations on business metrics.
2. Enriching insurer databases
Zelros’ “Insurance Data Catalog” module uses proprietary and third-party data to enrich insurers’ databases. Hyper localised information such as weather events, opt-in behavioural interests, or risk statistics collected and used to build up customer profiles. This facilitates the identification of future customer needs, thereby improving policy content advice quality.
3. Promoting responsible AI
Zelros has also worked with regulators to release its own open standard for the responsible and transparent use of AI in insurance. The aim is that filling this standard ‘check-list’ for each AI model in production will contribute to their traceability, compliance, and transparency.
The Oxbow Partners View
Increasing expectations spurred by the onset of digital transformation means best-in-class customer experience is a necessary growth engine that insurers should take note of.
We believe the Zelros proposition can be a key enabler in this space for 2 reasons:
Firstly, it is empowering traditional insurers to keep up with the brand engagement expectations set by the Big Tech ecosystems. Zelros’ AI solution enables full process automation and combines simplicity with strong personalisation to allow incumbent insurers to offer real-time adaptive policies and compete with fully digital players.
Secondly, solutions like Zelros will become increasingly essential as we see ever more complex and embedded insurance offerings. Insurers will need to be well-versed at explaining these and making expert decisions at multiple touchpoints in the insurance value chain to react at the speed expected by the customer.
Zelros’ AI can facilitate this by providing specific learning paths to guide advisors in picking and pairing the consumer’s best options. The fully explainable AI, both at a local (i.e. per decision) and global data level, can guarantee an audit track of these decisions and help coordinate the workload management at touchpoints.
The transformation of the insurance industry is at its beginnings, but technology like Zelros exists and is ready to be implemented by insurers.
Learn more about Zelros on Magellan™
