Understanding AI is non-negotiable for insurance carriers. Out of the entire spectrum of technology that have the potential to affect the insurance industry, the consensus is growing that AI is likely to have the biggest impact. The industry certainly believes this; insurance carriers’ investments in AI are increasing year-on-year, with the trend is set to continue, at least into 2019. And with good reason; Accenture’s Future Workforce Survey recently found that insurance companies that commit to AI to the same extent as “top-performing businesses could boost their revenue by an average 17 percent” by 2022.

AI has enormous potential for insurance; it has the power to connect customer data to product information in real-time, enhancing the customer experience and make processes faster and more efficient – exactly what the modern consumer desires.

Nonetheless, a major hurdle remains: figuring out how to get started. To provide some answers, Insurance Nexus recently held a webinar; “Turbocharge Tech Transformation: Integrate AI across Insurance” to explore the best strategies for how carriers can integrate AI across their operations. Moderator, Stephen Applebaum (Managing Partner, Insurance Solutions Group), was joined by Aviad Pinkovezky (Head of Product, Hippo Insurance), Alex Faynberg (Senior Vice President and Chief Actuary, Combined Insurance) and Fausto Martin (Founder, Fausto J. Martin & Company).

Listen to the recordings for exclusive insights into:

• Create a framework to prioritize your AI implementation: Focus on the areas of maximum effect, starting small. Pick the ‘low-hanging fruit’ and free up capital that can then pay for larger projects
• Target distribution with real-time performance analysis: empower agents and allow for real-time targeting to boost sales, lower acquisition costs, enhance customer satisfaction and increase retention
• Empower employees to become more efficient: with access to a data lake and single customer view, give employees insight into your organization’s shared knowledge, rather than rely on the experience and judgement of a single adjuster
• Identify areas for process improvement: before a process can be automated, it must first be well-defined and efficient. Although not every process can be automated, hear how Combined Insurance achieved savings through a focus on procedural efficiency

Listen to the recordings here

This webinar was run in association with the 6^th annual Insurance AI and Analytics USA 2019, taking place May 2-3 2019, at the Renaissance Chicago Downtown Hotel, Chicago, Illinois. Welcoming over 450 senior analytics leaders, the event will provide a strategic roadmap for carriers to maximize the impact of AI, machine learning and advanced analytics. For more information about Insurance AI and Analytics USA 2019, please visit the website: https://events.insurancenexus.com/analyticsusa/

Ira Sopic

Project Director

Insurance Nexus

E: ira.sopic@insurancenexus.com

Natixis Payments brings its Apetiz’s customers Apple Pay, which is transforming mobile payments with an easy, secure and private way to pay that’s fast and convenient. 

In a UK banking first, Barclays has today announced a service where Deaf or hard of hearing customers will be able to have their telephone conversations with the bank interpreted by a lipspeaker: a hearing person who can provide communication support by being easily lip read.

CoverWallet, the leading insurtech company that makes it easy for small businesses to understand, buy, and manage insurance online, today announced CoverWallet for Agents, a dedicated platform for insurance agents. 

IPC, a leading global provider of secure, compliant communications and networking solutions for the financial markets community, and GreenKey Technologies, creator of patented voice software with integrated speech recognition designed specifically for the financial markets, today announced that they have jointly been awarded the 2018 American Financial Technology Award (AFTA) for “Best Partnership or Alliance.”

Since early 2017, IPC and GreenKey have combined voice and artificial intelligence (AI) to allow traders to easily access a visible, transcribed stream of transaction threads, breaking new ground in data optimization, customer relationship management and workflow empowerment.  Their collaboration unlocks the value in voice communications by bringing together IPC’s trading communications expertise and cloud financial ecosystem of over 6,600 diverse market participants with GreenKey’s next-generation machine-learning technologies.

“Voice is arguably the most valuable source of data left to be digitized in today’s financial markets and AI is arguably one of the top technologies set to transform its future,” said Bob Santella, Chief Executive Officer of IPC.  “Along with GreenKey, IPC is honored to be recognized for the transformative and seamless efficiencies we are jointly bringing to traders globally, to flow from chat and instant message to more complex voice trading communications.”

GreenKey Founder Anthony Tassone said: "The IPC and GreenKey partnership is completely transforming sales and trading workflows.  We are rapidly building innovative desktop applications that unlock voice data, enabling our front-office customers to gain efficiencies by shedding administrative burdens. We’re grateful to Waters for this prestigious recognition."

Working collaboratively, IPC and GreenKey have brought a powerful AI-based speech recognition solution to market which enables IPC customers to harvest their audio streams as structured text data to enhance front-, middle- and back-office workflows. 

GreenKey’s speech recognition engine, called “Scribe”, specializes in “Financial Market English” to deliver the fastest and most accurate speech-to-text possible for capital market participants. Scribe’s language and acoustic models are trained on thousands of hours of market-specific content such as real-world broker/trader conversations, earnings calls and central bank conferences. The firm offers Scribe in multiple languages.

Interpretation is available via GreenKey’s proprietary natural language processing (NLP) libraries called “Product Interpreters” that extract quotes from densely transcribed audio streams or files.  For the first time, firms can unlock the “tribal” dialects of trading and leverage the data from the conversations.  Scribe is a highly customizable, containerized, Linux-based application set which can run on-premise or in the cloud and via real-time audio streams or historical audio files.

The two companies are also collaborating on a new co-development effort that provides regulated users the ability to:

• Convert a user's voice quotes and trades into a streaming transcript unfolding in real-time and displayed on desktop or mobile devices.
• Parse quotes and trades alongside conversational raw text. 
• Create a more real-time internal price data feed for organizations and enable easy scanning of multiple conversations for faster trading. 
• Access an activity dashboard integrating instant message and voice call transcripts, in-stream orders and quotes -- all data fed into compliance, surveillance, business analytics and CRM systems.

“Alliances between technology vendors play a crucial role in providing capital markets firms with the specific products and services they need to navigate an increasingly complex marketplace,” said Victor Anderson, editor-in-chief of Waters magazine and WatersTechnology. “This win illustrates IPC’s willingness and flexibility to collaborate with other technology specialists to the benefit of its clients.”

The AFTAs, hosted by Waters Magazine and waterstechnology.com, recognize excellence in the deployment and management of financial technology within the asset management and investment banking communities.

The Group Chairman & CEO of Path Solutions, Mohammed Kateeb has been named one of the ‘World’s 50 Most Influential Leaders in Islamic Economy in 2018’ in ISLAMICA 500 Guide.

This is Kateeb’s fourth year being nominated for this honor in the most recent list featuring a competitive group of 500 powerful people from 45 different countries, reflecting those making the difference in the Islamic economy space.

Kateeb received his higher education in the United States. He has been the Chairman of Path Solutions since 2008. Under his leadership, the company has experienced exponential growth, and is regularly ranked the ‘World’s Number One Islamic Financial Software Provider’ by leading analyst firms.

Kateeb serves as member of the Board of Trustees of IRTI, an affiliate of the Islamic Development Bank Group (IsDB) that focuses on developing a technology-enabled Islamic financial services sector leveraging state-of-the-art technology to mainstream Islamic economics and finance knowledge.

Only last month, the UK-based leading consulting firm Edbiz Consulting named Kateeb as the 2018 recipient of the ‘Advocacy Award’, for his outstanding accomplishments in Islamic financial advocacy. Furthermore, Kateeb was selected among the 'Leaders of Islamic Economy in East Africa in 2018' by GBS Africa, among other international recognitions. This prestigious nomination track record is unparalleled in this fast-growing industry.

“I’m honored and humbled to be four-time listed alongside such esteemed industry figures”, said Kateeb. “My mission and passion has always been to be an advocate for Islamic finance to help promote financial inclusion and support economic development. The biggest reward is seeing the industry moving forward with tech advancements; it makes it all worthwhile!”

ISLAMICA 500 Guide is a yearly publication of ISFIN, the world’s leading advisory firm for emerging markets. As an independent consultancy firm, ISFIN operates in 75 countries across five continents. The guide provides hard-to-find biographical details for 500 of the world’s most prominent and influential personalities in the Islamic world and economy. From this list, the top 50 individuals (‘ISLAMICA TOP 50’) who had major impact on the industry were identified based on a set of criteria including innovation, substance, pioneering initiatives, global impact and footprint, ethics and sustainability.

“Again, Kateeb is on the ISLAMICA 500 list of the 50 most influential figures in 2018, for he contributes immensely to the improvement of the Islamic economy. His outstanding reference work records his achievements on a global scale. He earned the respect of his peers and become a role model and an inspiration in his field. Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition”, commented Prof. Laurent Marliere, President & CEO of ISFIN and publisher of ISLAMICA 500 Guide. 

Kateeb was presented with a certificate during the ISLAMICA 500 Awards Reception on Wednesday 28 November at the Capital Club Bahrain. Earlier that day, Kateeb sat on a panel discussion entitled “How to go global in Islamic finance 2.0. The impact of fintech on the Islamic economy”.

For the list of this year’s Top 50 Most Influential Leaders in Islamic Economy, visit http://islamica500.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TOP-50-2018.pdf

Venafi^®, the leading provider of machine identity protection, today announced the results of a June 2018 commissioned study titled Securing The Enterprise With Machine Identity Protection. Conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Venafi, the study examined the views of 116 IT security professionals from financial services and insurance organizations in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France and Australia.

A key finding from the Venafi study reveals that eighty percent of financial services respondents who are responsible for identity and access management (IAM) believe automated communications between machines on their organizations’ networks are mostly or completely secure. Seventy-one percent of respondents believe effective protection of machine identities is critical to the long-term security and viability of their companies. However, on average, financial services organizations are only tracking forty-three percent of the most common types of machine identities. 

The study assessed the number of respondents who follow the progress of specific machine identities and found the following:

• Only fifty-six percent track cloud platform instance machine identities.
• Just fifty-five percent track physical server machine identities.
• Less than half (forty-eight percent) track mobile device machine identities.
• Roughly a third (thirty-four percent) track the machine identities of SSH keys.
• Only twenty-eight percent track the machine identities of containers.
• Just twenty-six percent track the machine identities of microservices.

“Financial services organizations have more work to do in order to make sure their machine identities are protected, and  we know these issues are not unique to a specific industry,” said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi. “Despite the importance of machine identities, most organizations are overwhelmed by the sheer number of them on their networks, and they don’t have the visibility, intelligence or automation necessary to take the necessary steps to close the gaping hole in security.” 

Additional findings from the study include:

• Forty-one percent say the lack of system administrator focus on machine identity use and protection is a major machine identity protection challenge, and forty-one percent say a major challenge is the lack of automated processes to inventory machine identities.
• Sixty percent of financial services firms are concerned about internal data theft or loss as a consequence of weak machine identity protection. In addition, fifty-eight percent are concerned about customer data theft or loss.
• Forty-five percent believe machine identity protection will be a higher priority than human identity protection within the next two years.

Managing user and machine identities, as well as privileged access to business data and applications, is an enormous undertaking that has serious security ramifications. Traditionally, the focus for IAM programs has been people-centric. However, with the recent increase in the number of machines on enterprise networks, shifts in technology, and the latest computing capabilities, a new set of challenges has emerged, requiring an increased focus on the protection of machine identities.

From Securing The Enterprise With Machine Identity Protection, Forrester Consulting, June 2018: “Newer technologies, such as cloud and containerization, have expanded the definition of machine to include a wide range of software that emulates physical machines. Furthermore, these technologies are spawning a tidal wave of new, rapidly changing machines on enterprise networks. To effectively manage and protect machine identities, organizations need: complete visibility of all machine identities across their networks; actionable intelligence about each machine identity; and the capabilities to effectively put that intelligence into action at machine speed and at scale.” 

CHRISTMAS may be the perfect time for gift giving, however when it comes to the workplace many bosses in the information and communications industry aren’t rewarding or recognising their employees with a token gift, according to new research.

A study of 1,000 UK workers published in the Most Generous Time of the Year Study by Perkbox, the UK’s fastest growing employee benefits platform, revealed that 23% of IT workers haven’t received any gift from their boss or manager at Christmas.

Of those who do get a token gift from their boss at Christmas, more than 1 in 3 (38%) said they received a team meal out.

This was followed by more traditional gifts with 29% receiving a drink related gift such as a bottle of wine or alcohol. 

Interestingly for bosses, when IT workers were asked what they would like to get from their boss at Christmas, monetary gifts were favoured – 35% revealed they would like a money-based bonus such as cash, a bonus payment in their salary or a gift card/voucher.

Meanwhile, a similar number (21%) said they would like to receive a pay rise from their boss at Christmas.

Chieu Cao, CMO & Co-Founder at Perkbox, said: “It is perhaps unsurprising to see that there is a disconnect between what employers give and what employees actually want to receive from their boss at Christmas. However, what is also interesting is the number of employees within the information and communications industry who don’t receive anything from management at all. Employers are clearly missing an opportunity to engage their staff - when they fail to reward and recognise them at Christmas. It’s a pity, as there are so many easy ways for employers to show their appreciation, and at a relatively small cost to the business. The positive impact of rewarding and recognising at Christmas would be increased productivity, and improved employee motivation and satisfaction, all year round. 

Cao continues: “In fact, we were not at all surprised to see the popularity of a money-based bonus such as cash, a bonus payment or a gift card among IT workers. Indeed, the Perkbox scheme understands that employees want access to personalised gift vouchers, discounts and freebies that can make their paycheques go further. With Christmas being an expensive time of year, the monetary savings or 'perks' passed on to employees will be greatly appreciated. 

These can offer choice, convenience and flexibility for both the business and the employee. By recognising what staff would really like to receive at Christmas, employers can show their staff how valued they are within the company and thank them for their efforts throughout the year.”

To review the what employee benefits staff really want, not only at Christmas but all year round, check out Perkbox's Most Generous Time of the Year Study here.