I am lucky to live in a car-free development by Kings Cross and that my preferred mode of transport is to either walk or cycle, but occasionally I like the idea of hiring a car for that impromptu getaway. Just one thing holds me back; the collection and drop-off experience.
It’s as if it’s been designed to be as fraught as possible. Long wait times (even when you’re 2nd in line), the attempts by junior salesmen to flog me exorbitant excess insurance (my recommendation – take out a £45 annual excess policy with Questor instead) and spending the entire weekend worrying about whether I’ll be held liable for damage I didn’t do.
That’s why I am so pleased our insurtech API gateway is helping rental car companies transform the experience so that renting is the joy it’s meant to be, from helping the customer manage their booking via SMS, to being able to auto check-in their vehicle upon vehicle return. And insurers are getting in on the act too, using AI-based technologies available from gateway partners BDEO, Claim Genius, Click-Ins, Monk.ai, Ravin.ai and TonkaBI. Insurers are applying an AI layer to photos or videos taken by the customers using their mobile phone, and creating a ‘digital fingerprint’ of the vehicle.
One of the questions I am asked by tech buyers (and the AI vendors themselves) is why we support so many AI options via our insurtech gateway. The reason is because no two AI solutions are alike. These solutions use different technologies, may have been trained to work for specific geographies, offer different in-app experiences for customers, come in at different transactional price points and have different end-results. As an insurtech gateway our objective is to help tech buyers find the best solution for their use case.
Technology
From an AI perspective, we particularly like solutions that don’t require ‘training data’ from the tech buyer, i.e. those that simply work out of the box. This is true of ‘universal’ solutions from BDEO, Click-Ins and Ravin.ai as opposed to ‘country-specific’ solutions that have been trained for a specific market, such as Claim Genius in the US. TonkaBI differentiate their service by developing highly bespoke AI models for each and every B2B client, who then have the option of purchasing the software outright (rather than licence), whereas Click-Ins and Monk.ai are able to auto-compare digital fingerprints across two points in time, e.g to identify changes between the time a vehicle was insured and the point of claim, or between the start and end dates of a vehicle rental.
Ease of Use
We particularly like Click-Ins where the images have already been captured in your own applications and you want to make an API call via our gateway to receive a real-time image analysis. Where you want to offer customers the option of walking around the vehicle and take a video, we like the augmented-reality solution from Ravin.ai. Uniquely, BDEO enables the agent to control the customer’s phone to do the inspection on their behalf or add relevant annotations/drawings.
Counter-Fraud
Some of these tools (e.g Click-Ins) also come with built-in counter-fraud detection, such as identifying whether all photos of the vehicle have been taken from the same geo-location. Perhaps your customer has taken 3 real photos, and uploaded a 4th of the vehicle that was taken some months ago or downloaded from the web. Should it not, or if you want to run further real-time counter-fraud forensics to validate images, our insurtech gateway has real-time APIs into vendors such as Attestiv or Photocert.
Using an insurtech gateway can help you build fully touchless, next-gen customer experiences in the cloud. If you would like to test any of the solutions or see them working side-by-side, reach out to us at hello@claimtechnology.co.uk or sign up for a trial account at www.claimtechnology.co.uk.
