Exclusive: 360Globalnet launches personal injury proposition

360Globalnet has launched an online personal injury product in a bid to overhaul the policy line.

The product - 360Retrieve Personal Injury Analyser (360PIA) - allows data to be converted from various sources to be made both searchable and editable, which can spot trends to combat fraud.

The product has been on the market for three to four weeks and has attracted the interest of half a dozen insurers.

It follows the original desktop version being launched in 2013. Since then the firm has developed it using data analytics and visualisation, as well as making the product available online.

Paul Stanley, chief executive at 360Globalnet claims that the product is unique, as it uses technology that no other insurer apart from its clients have seen before.

He told Insurance Times: “If data is the new oil, insurers are sitting on Saudi Arabia because 80% of the information they get is locked up in documentation.”

How does it work?

360PIA is available in the UK and US, it can profile in detail every aspect of personal injury claim and track its development.

This also includes how claims are presented by lawyers and the legal market in general.

It allows information to be taken from various places and processed using optical character recognition (OCR).

OCR enables different types of documents to be converted into editable and searchable data.

This can be anything from text-based documents, PDF files, emails or attachments and it can include digital images.

In other words, the system essentially machine reads the claim file and extracts information from various sources matching it with structured data.

Other firms in the past have tried to create a product like this but have been unsuccessful. 360Globalnet bought Infocap Technologies in 2013 which specialises in unstructured data.

The insurtech has also contributed its own in-house expertise r to the product.

Problems with personal injury claims

Stanley explained that within personal injury claims there has always been a problem.

Firstly, he said that the cost of personal injury claims is ever rising, he cited the new upcoming whiplash legislation in 2020.

He said: “As a claims manager one of the worst crimes you can commit is not having sufficient reserves on your claims.”

This is used to make up the shortfall for the years’ earnings which could impact insurers if reserves are miscalculated.

“Humans are fallible. Insurers have no idea what types of injuries they are dealing with as a whole, how many broken legs, multiple injuries, whiplash claims with post traumatic stress disorder or anxiety.

“They have no idea because you would have to manually enter that data and they can’t match it to the claimant,” he explained.

The issue Stanley said is that all insurers can do is to leave it up to humans to recall this information accurately.

But he claims that the technology allows this information once reported to be extracted and for the claim to be tracked.

Fraud

Stanley said that all the major fraud investigations involving banks have used the insurtech’s technology.

He explained: “In fraud you can get some really weird circumstances that you wouldn’t ever think would be possible, it’s a very powerful tool.”

It can even be used by police to isolate an area they are investigating and search for similar incidents.

Uptake

The insurtech has sold this product around six times in the last few weeks.

It is currently used by pathfinder Local Authorities in London and was used in the Madeleine McCann case. 

The product aims to give claims directors more control, information and intelligence around personal injury claims ensuring estimates don’t leap upwards from the previous year’s exposure.

Undertaken manually this task could incur human error.

Stanley said that the product is specifically targeted at issues for insurers like anti-fraud, GDPR and compliance.

He said the insurtech is continuing to invest substantially in the technology, and the product will go international shortly.