Artificial intelligence is impacting the future virtually for every industry and every human being. AI and ML have acted as the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics, and IoT. It will continue to act as a technological innovator for the foreseeable future. Cloud technologies are bringing in more agility to business processes, while AI and Machine Learning have the power to influence business outcomes/decisions.
The artificial intelligence and machine learning driven platform works with data from carriers, agents, brokers, and MGAs that allows them to know their clients on a deeper level, predict what is likely to happen next, and help them act on those predictions at the right point in time.
Aureus Analytics provides customer experience analytics solutions to the insurance industry. The company offers customer intelligence solutions to its wide insurance client base and enables them to deliver the best customer experience through customer retention, loyalty, and lifetime value. This is done by leveraging AI and Machine learning technologies and delivering actionable insights in natural language at the point of decision.
These technological advancements are looked after by Ashish Tanna, COO and Co-founder of Aureus Analytics. In addition to his deep domain expertise and analytics expertise, Ashish’s passion for big data and data science helps him drive the customer experience business for the insurance industry.
Embracing Technological Advancements
CRUX – Insurance-specific AI-powered platform. AI platform learns and builds metadata across customers. A real-time AI platform that uses predictive analytics and machine learning to provide business and analytics users the ability to capture data from a variety of both internal and external sources. The application is available across all device form factors. Hence, it gives any business user the ability to access insights that the solution produces at any time and on the device of their choice.
The AI platform CRUX has processed more than 65 million policies for key customers in India that include SBI Life, Bajaj Allianz Life, TATA AIA Life, Bharti AXA Life, and Kotak Life.
SentiMeter® – A standardized metric to calculate the customer experience and understand the sentiment of all policyholders on a scale of 0-100 across the entire customer journey. Aureus’s proprietary algorithm SentiMeter® uses deep text analytics and artificial intelligence to measure the customer experience in real-time for all policyholders. The Aureus SentiMeter® solution helps the carrier define essential insights for every stage of the policy engagement workflow.
Predictive models – Predict the consumers’ behavior in real-time and identify the next best action for policyholder retention, cross-sell, and up-sell opportunities. The typical use cases predict and identify potentially fraudulent claims, improve cross-sell/upsell, and build persistence/retention analytics.
Customer One View (COV) – Single view of customer’s entire portfolio throughout the customer journey. Aureus proprietary person de-dupe logic helps create person-level records and unique customer identities by clustering matching records across enterprise databases.
Household Analytics – The patent-pending householding algorithm provides insurance carriers with the ability to view and understand the portfolio dynamics at a household level instead of just at the individual level. Proprietary person deduping logic, which includes a robust name matching logic and multi-parameter matching algorithm to identify different records for the same person. Proprietary address matching logic for Indian addresses.
Erudite Mentor
Ashish Tanna, currently the COO and Co-Founder of Aureus Analytics has previously occupied the position of Vice President at CBay Systems India Ltd., where he was managing global operations. Having worked in industries such as ITES, healthcare, and steel for over two decades, he is a seasoned entrepreneur, who has started and exited previous businesses with success.
Expert Advice
AI and ML technologies today can predict the behavior of a customer, which helps businesses to act in advance and give a superior customer experience. Using machine learning and Artificial Intelligence-driven models, Aureus has been able to help insurers reduce early claims by more than 50%, improve retention, and cross-sell by 5%.
Piercing through the Pandemic
The biggest challenge was to ensure employee safety with a smooth transition from physical working environments to virtual workstations. Besides also maintaining the best standards of client services and business deliverables with minimal disruption.
With HR support, all employees were moved to work from home while taking care of all the required infra/support to work efficiently and service the clients. Keeping the team motivated and virtually connected with weekly catchup sessions with different agendas.
A town hall meeting was set with top management executives at least once every month to share company-wide updates and concerns with the entire team. Finally, psychological counseling and training sessions with expert counselors were done to share helpful tips on how to manage mental and physical health in distressed times.
Valuable Guidance
“I would say this is the best time to start your venture if you have an idea/product, which solves a business problem. Today the entrepreneurs have a full-fledged ecosystem where the government is helping/creating policies to foster entrepreneurship, venture funds are available, and top of it the availability of skilled resources and technology,” says Ashish.
“Keep patience while running your venture as it is going to take time and you will face many hurdles. Always keep your cost in check and think from the customer perspective and the differentiated value you can deliver,” adds Ashish.
Journey Ahead
Aureus launched the DONNA (www.donnaforagents.com) platform in April 2020. This AI-driven platform is focused on the IA (Independent Agency) market in the US. Since the launch, the platform has seen rapid acceptance by the market even with minimal spending in marketing.
Within the past 14 months, the company has onboarded 70+ agencies, 1 Carrier and 1 Agency Association; integrated with 3 of the top 5 AMS systems and processed more than $1.6B of premium. Since its launch, the product has had 1 major release (DONNA 2.0) and the latest release (DONNA 3.0) is currently in its finishing stages.
Currently, in the US, there are more than 38,000 agencies. This combined with the carriers represents a huge market opportunity for DONNA. The firm strongly believes that the product-market fit is now established, and the next phase is to scale the business significantly.
For India, it already works with 10-11 top insurers and its focus would be to go deep within existing clients while focusing on acquiring new life insurers.
Milestones and Achievements
Product Milestones:
- 15+ active insurance customers that are on the full commercial stage of business. Most of them working on multiple use cases and associated with Aureus for over 5 years. Focus Offerings include Sentiment Analytics, Customer One View, Predictive Analytics – Retention, Claims and Fraud, Cross-sell, and Advisor Analytics.
- 65Million+ policies processed for mid-sized and large insurers.
- Platform capability for large Enterprise Network, deployed for 300+ branch users.
- 100% Conversion from Paid POC to Production.
- Zero Customer Churn till date.
Aureus celebrated the 1st year anniversary of DONNA, an Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics Platform for Independent Agents. DONNA’s mission is to enable independent agencies to leverage vast data sets that they already own and deliver a superior customer experience to their policyholders.
DONNA is an example of how expensive and complex artificial intelligence technology, previously only accessible to large players in the insurance industry, is now available to agencies of all sizes. DONNA is integrated with leading Agency Management Systems, thereby eliminating the need for complex IT integration to get started.
Business Achievements
- 7 crore fraud saves through proactive identification using early claims fraud predictive model
- 37% reduction in early claims frequency for a large insurer within a year
- SentiMeter® has helped 600+ customer service representatives of a life insurance company improve customer interactions and experience they offer their customers
- Improved retention rates by more than 3% pts, cross-sell by 5% pts, and NPS by more than 30 points in less than 6 months.
Brand Innovations
From time to time, Aureus has collated the views of industry think tanks and published them with in-house expert and SME opinions. One of these efforts was Aureus Insights, an offline/online yearbook series featuring incisive views from senior executives across the insurance value chain.
Awards & Recognition
- Aureus Analytics receives 2021 CT Entrepreneur Honorable Mentions Awards.
- Aureus was featured in India’s Dynamic InsurTech Map produced by The Digital Insurers in collaboration with India InsurTech Association.
- Aureus Analytics was named a Top Data Science Service Provider in India in 2019.
- Aureus Analytics included in Singapore’s Top 10 High Growth Analytics & AI Startups with the Highest Funding.
