Clearspeed turns to voice analytics to process claims ‘at lightning speed’

By James Thaler

June 24 - (The Insurer) - Clearspeed is applying voice analytics originally developed for threat detection on the battlefield to create a “claims acceleration tool” for a growing array of business lines, its founder Alex Martin said.

Martin, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, spoke to The Insurer TV at this month’s Insurtech Insights USA conference ahead of an announcement of Clearspeed’s latest fundraise.

“One of my dear friends was killed in an insider attack in Iraq in 2008, and he was killed by an Iraqi soldier that actually was an al Qaeda operative,” Martin said of the insurtech's backstory.

“It was an indelible mark on my life, and me and a couple of my co-founders looked at the problem and said, ‘Why did this happen, and what could have been done to prevent it?’” Martin added.

“Not pointing any blame, but there wasn't any technology solving the problem,” he said, adding that Clearspeed's voice analytics tool had been built to address “the enormity of the vetting challenge".

Martin describes the tool as “trust technology”, which helps gain insights that are not otherwise readily available.

“We have come into this world to create this new technology and a new category. Trust technology is a category we've brought to defence and security, and now we're bringing it into the insurance world,” he said.

Clearspeed applies its technology via automated questionnaires to any question in any language, agnostic to both identity and culture.

“We don't know anything about the person other than they need to get paid, and this claim needs to get processed,” Martin said, adding that Clearspeed’s analytics provides an output that can help detect claims fraud by analysing responses to simple yes-or-no questions.

“That allows claims to be processed with lightning speed, fraud to be identified that no AI can find, and the buckets of value that trickle out of that are time and money savings (and) increased action rate,” Martin said.

FRAUD VETTING

Clearspeed was founded in 2016, initially as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense, and has since expanded into insurance. The company counts Germany's Allianz among its earliest clients, and says it works with nine of the 10 largest UK insurers.

Martin said Allianz recorded a 60% increase in the amount of payments being fast-tracked in its first year of usage.

“We're seeing a 90% reduction in the amount of time it takes to process those, so the amount of time it takes on other cases is being reduced by 90%, we had an increase of 200% in fraud that we found that would have been missed,” he added.

“So, this is where it ties back to this idea where everyone, whether you're in a Navy SEAL platoon or you're at Allianz or Zurich, everyone has an inelastic decision to make. I can go 100% fast or 100% rigour on pace of security or fraud vetting,” Martin said.