How Acrisure speeds up the insurance process with AI

"Indicia's AI-driven quote-and-buy flow helps us respond to the changes in the insurance market," says Victor Kuijstermans, director of Your Benefits Assuradeuren, part of insurance broker Acrisure. The tool lets employers offer their employees a standard 10 per cent discount on their existing insurance. And getting an offer no longer takes days, just a few minutes.

Acrisure is an international insurance broker and financial services provider. In the Netherlands it develops and manages insurance products for various brands and group schemes. Acrisure works with insurers and handles underwriting, claims and customer service, among other things, so it is involved in the whole process, from developing an insurance product to contact with the customer.

Time for a new proposition

Insurance premiums used to sit relatively close together, but the differences kept widening. As a result, a group discount through an employer no longer automatically meant a real saving for the employee. "At Acrisure we could see the existing propositions no longer fitted the market as it had changed. So we came up with something new: if employees take out insurance through us, they get a standard 10 per cent discount on their existing policy."

Not feasible by hand

An attractive offer, but one with a catch. To be able to give that discount, Acrisure first has to know what the current policy looks like: the premium, the cover, the terms. "If we have to look all of that up and compare it by hand for every customer, it takes an enormous amount of time. And it is an awkward process for the customer too: get in touch, email documents and then sometimes wait days for a quote." So Acrisure went looking for a way to make the customer journey simpler and automate the process. That is where Indicia came in.

An obvious choice

Choosing Indicia felt obvious. Victor: "Acrisure's website was built by Indicia too and we are very happy with it. In the first conversations, Indicia mapped out what we wanted properly. Then they started building, and that went really quickly."

From policy to offer

Indicia built an AI-driven insurance and quote-and-buy flow. Customers simply upload a photo or PDF of their existing policy. OCR (optical character recognition) recognises the text in the document, and AI then pulls the relevant information out of the policy, such as the premium, the cover and the terms. The solution also checks whether any necessary details are missing. It then uses that information to calculate Acrisure's offer. Victor: "Within minutes, the customer sees what the insurance costs through us. That figure is a standard 10 per cent lower than their current premium."

AI speeds things up, people decide

A large part of the process runs automatically, but the final assessment is deliberately left to people. "Once the customer has been through the digital flow, we check whether the application meets all the requirements," Victor says. "We look at the claims history and any fraud or other notifications, for example. We are not allowed to automate the final decision on an application completely; that stays with a person. So AI mainly takes over the time-consuming administrative work. We stay involved in every application, but each one takes us far less time."

From days to minutes

Acrisure has been working with the AI flow for about a year now, and Victor says the benefits are clear. "As a company we work almost entirely online. A manual application process really did not fit that at all. Now we save a lot of administrative work, and therefore time, which we can put into other things." The difference for customers is just as big. "They sometimes used to wait days for an offer. Now they have it within ten minutes. With insurance in particular, you want to help someone at the moment the interest is there. We see that in the figures too: conversion has risen from around 30 to 50 per cent."

Enterprising together

Acrisure stayed closely involved during development as well. "Indicia kept us well informed and we kept bouncing ideas off each other. Things came up while building that we had not thought of or written down in advance. Indicia picked those up quickly and we looked for a solution together. It is good to be able to switch gears quickly at moments like that." Victor says Indicia's attitude fits Acrisure well. "There is a strong sense of enterprise. They do not see obstacles everywhere; they are willing to put their foot down."

Ready for the next step

Acrisure is already looking ahead. "The tool is ready for a version 2.0. We originally built it for the relationship between employers and employees, but other insurance intermediaries now use their own variant as well, and every party has different requirements. At the moment those variants are still built largely on the same technical foundation. Together with Indicia we want to look at how to set that up more cleverly, so there is more room for tailoring per intermediary." Victor says the basis for that next step is already in place. "We know what we have in each other by now. That gives a lot of confidence."