Sompo Holdings Asia wins AI Award for General Insurance in SBR Technology Excellence Awards 2020

Singapore – (8 June 2020) – Sompo Holdings (Asia) Pte. Ltd. (Sompo Asia) received the AI Award for general insurance during Singapore Business Review’s recently concluded Technology Excellence Awards.

Sompo Asia has been a market leader in Asia’s non-life insurance industry with over 70 years of trusted presence in the region outside Japan, providing solutions to ensure customers’ security, health and wellbeing worldwide. It is part of the century old Sompo Holdings headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.

Seeing a gap in the tedious and time-consuming manual claims review process, which affected customer experience and efficiency, Sompo Asia’s Digital Team decided to develop a fraudulent claims detection application using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)  approach to corroborate claims data input by human professionals. Using complex algorithm modeling, this workflow yields a more regulated and efficient claims processing, expediting straight-through claims payments much more promptly, and thus enhancing customer satisfaction.

This initiative also stems from Sompo Group’s digital transformation and the need for InsurTechs to solve efficiency, productivity and customer experience problems. One way is by understanding the positive influence of AI; and calibrating their models and strategies to incorporate AI in the most befitting areas alongside crafting and executing structured schemes.

Collaborating with AI Singapore (AISG) under their flagship 100 Experiments Programme, the project is a result of the company’s need to resolve the roadblocks it encountered when it came to fraudulent detection of travel and personal accident claims. Recognizing Sompo Insurance Singapore as a good talent resource for developing their AI team, Sompo Asia invited its subsidiary to join this project.

The project took only 7 months from conceptualization to development to pilot testing of an AI platform that flags out dubious cases, which require investigation in a more timely manner. Once these cases are detected, they are handed over to internal specialists for additional inspection. The company also uses this improved workflow for talent development as internal employees are now able to use the time spent on manual filtering to reinforce higher capabilities and skill sets for suspicious case analysis and investigations.

The AI Fraudulent Claims Detection effectively enforces and guarantees 100 percent fraud detection coverage, resulting in an improvement of 90 percent in detecting fraudulent claims.  Once the production deployment goes live in Sompo Insurance Singapore by the end of June 2020, at least 20% of their customers whose claims have cleared the application will receive their claims payments much more quickly, potentially within minutes in the near future.

Sompo Asia is considered to be the pioneer in utilizing both internal and third-party technology in attempting to gain an industry-wide perspective towards fraudulent claims.

The seven-month partnership with AISG enabled the company to successfully and promptly develop and hand over the AI minimum viable model. Their employees relieved time from their busy schedules to participate in project meetings, contribute insight and information on domain areas and establish the environment for training the models, and eventually deploying the AI minimum viable model.

The Sompo Asia and Sompo Insurance Singapore teams also exhibited a high degree of professionalism and commitment by actively engaging in all necessary levels of the project’s development and providing essential support to AISG’s team throughout the project cycle.

The project’s proof of concept was successful in closing in December 2019 and as of writing, production deployment in Sompo Insurance Singapore is scheduled to launch at the end of this month.

The Technology Excellence Awards, presented by Singapore Business Review, was held via video conferencing throughout the first and second week of June 2020.

This year’s nominations were judged by a panel consisting of Daryl Pereira, Head of Cyber at KPMG; Cheang Wai Keat, Head of Advisory Services in Singapore and ASEAN Technology Consulting Leader at Ernst & Young; Chin Chee Choon, Advisory Leader and Assurance Director at Nexia TS; Rizwi Wun, Partner, Acting Head of Intellectual Property and Technology Practice Group at RHTLaw Asia; Carolyn Chin-Parry, Managing Director and Digital Accelerator Leader at PwC.