Max Life Insurance, a private life insurer, wants to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to ensure that at least 70-75 per cent of the policies are auto underwritten for retail business, a top official said.

This is part of the company’s aspiration to build an industry-best underwriting capability that would help it manage underwriting risks better without compromising on issuance speed to customers, Manu Lavanya, Director and Chief Operations Officer, Max Life Insurance, told BusinessLine .

Sharing the various facets of the AI/ML initiatives of the company that are being embedded in its underwriting and onboarding processes, he said currently, the company manages to do auto underwriting for about 55-60 per cent of policies. “We are also the only company in the industry that does auto underwriting for protection (policies),” he said.

The key AI/ML initiatives that are embedded in the processes of the company are Vision AI for fraud detection of prospective sales to check for existing comorbidities; Using ML for Diagnostic centre fraud detection; Leverage of intelligent ICR and OCR for seamless recognition of onboarding documents and Intelligent analytics for upfront auto underwriting of new business.

“These initiatives are driving significant improvement in straight-through processing that in turn uplifts our ability to reduce issuance turnaround time for the customers,” he said.

Intelligent Sales Management platform

Meanwhile from September 1 rollout (phase 1), Max Life will launch its new Intelligent Sales Management platform that will leverage AI and ML to drive higher sales productivity and process excellence. “ This will make sure we have customised nudges, customised pings to our front end sales agents, measuring their learnings and progress, doing analytics on it and predicting their success”, he noted.

“What we are trying to do is instead of focusing on offline AI, can I do the decision making at the point of transaction. Can I embed AI to be part of the transaction event itself. I don’t think AI by itself will not be a differentiator. What will be the differentiator is who builds the smarter model and smarter context and who has better scalable data infrastructure to truly gain the benefit of AI. Will AI itself become a differentiation, I don't think so,” he said.

He highlighted that Max Life Insurance — striving to be a digital-first company—was an early adopter of AI and had set up a dedicated team (AI Works) as early as 2011. Over the last decade, the company has come up with several digital-led initiatives for serving customers and using AI for the purpose of improving customer experiences.

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