Get bot-based car, home insurance

For the past 18 months, artificial intelligence (AI) has helped a bot sell insurance in SA. Now it is getting even smarter. Meet Rose. She wants to sell you insurance. But you can’t shout at Rose if you find her annoying. Well, you can, but she won’t care. Because Rose is a software robot, better known as a bot. She automates the process of selling insurance, but in a way that will make life easier and more efficient.

If you’ve ever dealt with the bots used by mainstream financial services organisations, you’ll know that they are close to useless. Typically, they match keywords in your query to keywords in their database and suggest where you can get more information online or by speaking to a human call centre representative. Sometimes, you get a menu list that is so generic, you may as well be browsing a static website.

These bots prove automation is not the same as artificial intelligence. This user-unfriendliness is a boon for new players entering what is now known as “fintech” – financial technology. They can reinvent services without having to maintain legacy systems, can overlay a true customer orientation and can run rings around the big players.

Enter Rose. She works for Naked Insurance, which describes itself as “SA’s first AI-native insurance provider, offering comprehensive cover…” Naked says, because its fully automated systems are free from legacy technology and infrastructure, it can give customers unprecedented control over their insurance experience – and significant savings.

Naked began using a bot to sell car insurance less than two years ago and has now graduated to home insurance. Buildings can be insured for up to R10 million and contents for up to R2.5 million – with Rose generating a quote in 90 seconds. Naked promises she can sign up a customer for home and contents insurance “in under three minutes – completely online”. Even better, they can claim from, manage, change and cancel policies from the app.

Naked Insurance co-founder Ernest North says: “Over the past 18 months, the success of car insurance has been really good.” While Naked Insurance sounds brilliant in theory, some clients are hesitant to make use of a new type of insurance, especially when considering that traditional insurance platforms have vast portfolios for covering their clients. For this reason, Naked is expanding its insurance portfolio.

“A lot of people have said they’re reluctant to switch just their car insurance without their buildings or home insurance,” says North. Naked Insurance launched its original platform in April 2018 and is also fine-tuning interactions between clients and technology.

“I’m quite fascinated by the ability to use customer interaction data as an input into the AI in allowing it to estimate what the client needs,” says North.

“For example, the client answers a couple of questions and it takes about 90 seconds to do the home insurance quote. It estimates based on credit score and the area people live in, but also things like what car they drive, how much the value of their house should be or the value of contents cover that they need.

“It is really interesting that the AI can dynamically look at two people, who look fairly similar in profile, and recommend to the one person to buy R500 000 cover and to the other one that they should buy R700,000 cover.

“This addresses a big issue in the industry. Other insurance companies wait until a claim happens and then start doing the investigations and then say you were only worth 70% so we are only going to pay 70% of the claim.

“We bring the majority of that investigation to the beginning, and we are helping people pick the right amount of coverage …”

In short, customers become their own insurance inspectors, thanks to the versatility of the app.

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