Synechron, Inc, the global financial services consulting and technology services provider, today announced an update on its award-winning Visual Risk Accelerator. The Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning-enabled Accelerator is focused on improving the tedious, highly-manual insurance risk assessment processes so the underwriter can focus on more complex applications, with upwards of 80% of applications being automated. Synechron’s Visual Risk was honored with the Industry Disrupter Award at the ACORD Insurance Innovation Challenge in 2017 and a Commercial Insurance Award for 2018.

The Visual Risk Accelerator gives underwriters a Dashboard view, which provides an overview of day-to-day activities, including submissions, quotes given, contracts bound, declined applications, and summary data on how many policies have been issued, and with this, aims to improve efficiency for the risk-assessment process by automating up to 80% of all applications, leaving the most complex cases for the underwriters’ focus. The machine learning enabled model looks at over 70+ data sources for a given applicant, such as local crime, industry risks, accidents, weather, lawsuits, health code violations, Yelp ratings and more.

Visual Risk was first launched as part of Synechron’s InsurTech Accelerator program last year, a set of prototype applications built and tested in Synechron’s FinLabs, which are then customized for client use. Since then, Visual Risk has been further built upon based on client feedback and enhancements to provide more efficiency to the underwriting process. In the latest update to Visual Risk, the following functionalities have been added based on user feedback and bottlenecks where processes were able to be sped up and improved:

• AI Image Recognition, which is employed to analyze data from Yelp and Google reviews to identify key objects in photographers typically related to an inspection, such as alcohol
• AI topic Modeling is used to highlight risks in reviews based on negative reviews and scoring
• An added News section, which identifies other types of non-declared risks, including a direct feed for Osha Inspections, lawsuits, and a Twitter sentiment analysis
• An integrated Bot has been added, which allows the underwriter to “ask me” and “train me” to access the latest available data for increased usability and an enhanced customer experience
• Through a partnership with Experian, Visual Risk also has Business Data integrated directly into the platform covering revenue, FSR score, FEIN, Year in Business, Social Media Score, NAIC, and Employee data as complimentary feeds, and additional feeds for more extraneous Experian data can be added and accessed through API access

This raw data is coupled with the firm’s own historical underwriting data and fed into predictive models that then score the potential risk associated with the application, allowing the underwriter to automate processing around low-risk applications. The Overall Risk Soring is broken down into three categories: Risk Score, Fraud Score, and Win Score. For the Win Score, Machine Learning is applied with historical data sets to determine probability for the application to be converted, allowing the underwriter to Reject/Refer/Automate  the application, with adjustable automation criteria.

Bruce Polsky, Managing Director and Insurance Practice Head at Synechron, said: “At Synechron, we wanted to address these pain points associated with old systems, and drive change to benefit our clients and an overall legacy-plagued industry. We are honored by Visual Risk’s previous wins, but strive to continue to innovate the powerful solution. By developing a solution to allow underwriting and risk assessment to be more strategic, and applying the latest innovations to increase efficiency by creating more complete and intuitive experiences, we know we are freeing the hands of clients to focus on more complex things.”