Omniscience launches first life insurance underwriting automation suite designed for today’s highly complex business environment

PALO ALTO, CA – APRIL 20, 2020 – Omniscience today announced a new software suite that will, for the first time, automate life insurance underwriting decision-making by taking into account the many layers of complexity, breadth of data, and need for immediacy that modern providers face. Specifically, by using new underlying technology from Omniscience, this suite can accelerate life insurance decisions 1000 times or more and integrate requirements impacting the whole company in every result.

The issues facing life insurance underwriting have grown exponentially over the past few years. These result from the constantly updated availability of data from diverse sources, the evolving regulatory environment in each country, and market growth. Simultaneous to this, the number of experienced underwriters has not grown at the same rate. The Covid-19 pandemic has multiplied the factors companies need to account for in their current environment.

“Our customers, many of whom are in Asia, are reporting that they are experiencing a dramatic increase in their workloads,” said Sunil Rawat, Co-founder and CEO of Omniscience. “There are both many more claims due to the pandemic and more applications for life insurance than in the past.” This change in demand has put unexpected pressure on carriers.

Moreover, according to The Wall Street Journal on March 11, 2020, the pandemic has created new, unanticipated and sudden pressures: “US life insurers have taken it on the chin during the novel coronavirus epidemic. But . . . the unprecedented collapse in bond yields is the financial risk that investors and analysts are fretting over. . .” This means life insurers are impacted by investment losses, policy losses, and other business pressures in addition to the systemic pressures that have been emerging over the past few years.

“In reality,” explained Tom Niermann, Omniscience Vice President of Product. “The level of complexity facing life insurers has grown in many dimensions over the past few years. These pressures, combined with the dramatic stresses from Covid-19, just makes this environment even more challenging.”

About the Omniscience Life Insurance Underwriting Automation Suite

Simply put, Omniscience Life Insurance Underwriting Automation Suite can handle both the breadth of data from many sources and the new, multifaceted demands of today’s life insurance providers. Until now, life Insurance software has only handled some of the data and very few of the many layers of business issues providers face. This new underwriting suite was designed to accomplish the following:
• Replicate the judgement and decision skill of senior underwriters;
• Dramatically speed (1000 times or more) accurate new customer underwriting, review, and acceptance – even where broad arrays of complex medical or alternate (i.e. fluidless) data is used;
• 90% cost reduction per decision;
• Continuous improvement of risk selection and explainability;
• Continuous identification of new, previously unseen opportunities for product development.
This summary of capabilities is differentiated from existing life insurance underwriting software. Up until now other software options, including rules engines and expert systems, have not been able to handle high dimensions of complexity or provide continuous business improvements. (See Chart.)

The Omniscience Risk engine is at the heart of the entire suite. It ingests data from many possible sources, including health records and APS. Among the components of the suite are digitization of all available data, a fully customizable third-party data collection and integration tool, and underwriter decision support and audit tools.

Unique Omniscale Technology Foundation Makes this New Computational Insurance Suite Possible

Several years ago, Omniscience saw that many decisions in modern and future businesses cannot be based solely on the facts of a discrete transaction and its impact on a specific business unit or line of business. Many decisions must integrate the complexities of both the individual transaction and the needs of the entire business both in the near term and long term.

But up until now the broadly available technology used by insurers (as well as most mid-sized and large businesses) has been unable to handle these systemic changes: there are simply too many datasets that need to be analyzed immediately and on an ongoing basis for current software and services. Omniscience’s core Omniscale® Technology is designed to handle the new, vast amounts of data across many datasets and can accommodate the complexities of Computational Insurance.

Explained Rawat, “We hope that our many years of work on this new product suite can be combined to be helpful to customers facing the unanticipated complexities of today’s pandemic as well as their long-term business demands.”

About Omniscience

Omniscience (www.omniscience.com) is the first company to handle and decipher complex, hyperdimensional data sets without any approximations. This enables customers to make accurate business decisions, and find new, well-timed opportunities. The Omniscale computing model combines mathematical transformations, advanced AI and unique distributed computing to help insurance and financial services companies grow market share, save on costs, boost return on equity, and increase regulatory compliance. Over time many additional markets will also be able to use Omniscience to decipher the chaos in their environments. Based in Palo Alto, CA, investors in Omniscience include Reinsurance Group of America, Guardian Life, TD Bank, Translink Capital, and others.