Atidot, a cloud based software company empowering the life insurance industry
/f/121246/768x768/4bd889ca21/image.jpg)
We talked with Dror Katzav, CEO and co-founder of Atidot, which raised $5.8M.
How would you describe Atidot in a single tweet?
Atidot is a cloud-based software company empowering the life insurance industry to become data-driven and optimize its balance sheet using AI and predictive analytics.
How did it all start and why?
Barak Bercovitz (Atidot co-Founder, CTO) and I have always shared the same enthusiasm for data and in 2016, we were looking to apply our analytical skills to an industry lacking in data analytics. So, we assessed multiple industries that were still handling processes manually and insurance stood out as a sector desperately needing data-driven support. We saw an untouched opportunity in the life insurance market: up to 40%-50% of life insurance policies were non-profitable and up to 80% of data held by life insurers were not being used for strategic purposes. We were motivated to launch Atidot as the world’s first technology company dealing directly with life insurance data, and we teamed up with leading actuarial experts, such as the former Insurance Commissioner of Israel and the Chief Actuary of the Israel Ministry of Finance to design our solutions.
What have you achieved so far?
Atidot has helped life insurance companies to be disrupted without the disruption. What we do is we gather data from all the different systems and very quickly use machine learning and big data technologies to generate new insights into these policies. These insights have a genuine impact and translate into an improved bottom line.
In terms of clients, we can share two examples. One is for a South African life insurance company called Platinum Life. We analyzed about 1.5 million policies and we were able to predict lapse behavior about 14% more accurately than existing models. From this, we found that if insurance companies optimize the way they do lapse prevention and marketing distribution for customers with high and low lapse rates, this could result in a 30% – 35% increase in premium collection.
For the second example, the company wishes to remain unnamed, but it’s one of the top ten insurance carriers in the U.S. With them, we detected which policy-owners were potentially under-insured and reached out to them through independent financial advisors who were part of their network. Through our analysis, we discovered underinsured areas that can be rounded up to over $1 billion in missed business opportunities. The conversion rates of financial advisors reaching out to those customers went up by over 150%.
We have also partnered with key technology leaders such as Microsoft, as well as recognized industry players, iPipeline, Sureify, TechMahinda to name a few, in order to ensure that our solutions have the maximum impact.
What do you plan to achieve in the next 2-3 years?
We are planning on having a massive impact in the coming years by helping companies take control of the data they have and maximizing their potential revenue, with the goal of getting them to achieve double-digit profit margins. Our solutions make this feasible as we enable the life insurance provider to truly understand their customers and anticipate their changing needs, thereby ensuring they can provide them with the right coverage and keep policies active as well as sell new ones. We are enabling a win-win for the companies and the policyholders, better, more accurate coverage along with better service and policy pricing
To do so we plan to continue our global expansion, recruit experts, and continue to provide our services to the leading companies.
We plan to continue to work with the mid-sized companies, still losing hundreds of millions just from not reaching out and upselling existing customers.
On a macro level, we are focused on global expansion. We plan to grow our US and European presence, and hire more experts from the insurance industry to add to our strong team of insurance veterans: Martin Snow, who was an actuary at Prudential and at TIAA and Prof. Oded Sarig, who was the former Israeli Commissioner of Insurance, as well as the Chairman of several Israeli insurance companies and a lecturer at Wharton and IDC Herzliya.
Overall, our plan is to continue to empower insurers with constant analysis of data on policyholders to create new opportunities for client communications, to either offer a new service or adjust a policy, thereby increasing policyholder satisfaction and retention.
Originally Published in PetaCrunch