Christian Van Leeuwen, CTO & Co-Founder The insurance industry was created to protect people from the dangers of risk. People had faith in insurance companies and insurance companies had trust in the people they insured. But the rampant increase in fraud is shaking the foundation of insurance. Fraudsters are taking advantage at the cost of genuine customers. Christian van Leeuwen, CTO and co-founder of FRISS, and Jeroen Morrenhof—co-founder and CEO of the company— have dedicated their entire professional careers to the insurance industry to help insurance companies tackle fraud. Insurers have taken remedial steps that range from increasing the premium to demanding several proofs of identity documents to validate the customer before delivering the payout, all of which only add to a strenuous customer experience and poor business outcomes. “Insurance fraud is unacceptable and needs to be addressed immediately to break the vicious cycle and regain trust,” says Van Leeuwen.
FRISS is committed to supporting honest insurance by delivering automated fraud detection and risk mitigation solutions to property and casualty (P&C) insurance companies across the globe. A strong advocate of AI in the insurance space, Van Leeuwen announces that AI is the magic box that everybody is looking for. The company leverages all forms of AI tools available ranging from general AI to product AI to custom AI, and delivers the most cutting-edge solutions for fraud analytics. At the center of its solutions is the real-time FRISS Score. These scores not only indicate the risk associated with each claim and policy, but also provide a clear picture of their risk and how they handle a fraudulent situation. “We restore the win-win situation for both the parties while helping insurers fight fraudsters,” asserts Van Leeuwen.
"In order to fight fraud, FRISS turns data into actionable insights"
For instance, the company has been working with a large international insurance company to automate the glass property claims process. FRISS leverages AI to determine the presence of windows in a building or a property, based on pictures. Leveraging the product AI, the company has trained its system to screen the images with windows in it to identify broken glass, and whether the images have been tampered with, to find potential fraud. “We train general AI on a massive amount of image examples for this generic task,” explains Van Leeuwen. The system also performs a digital analysis of an image pool, including reserved internet searches to find duplicates. Finally, to fully automate the claims process, FRISS uses custom AI to comprehend the functioning of the system for the insurance company, as well as understand their procedures, types of channels, and the authorization thresholds in place.
Van Leeuwen believes the battle against fraud cannot be won by having AI just as a catchphrase. There is a strong need for relevant data and a clear objective in place for AI to solve the problem. Organizations need to begin their AI endeavors with the existing data, but subsequently, they must continually add new data sets like IoT data, shared data pools, or the data generated through digitization of the existing processes, to get actionable insights and perform machine learning. The end result is an automated fraud monitoring model that triggers a self-learning process. With this as its guiding light, FRISS focuses on data aggregation, cleansing, and normalization to minimize false positives. The solution has an ‘insurance/claims-only’ network graph viewer that illustrates the potential fraudulent claims.
With the FRISS Score, claim adjusters, underwriters, and fraud investigators can always explain to customers or agents the reason behind the system flagging a claim
The AI-generated claim investigation hit should always be explainable to the customers, and FRISS ensures that their score provides actionable insights. “With a FRISS score, claims adjusters, underwriters, and fraud investigators can always explain to customers or agents the reason behind the system denying a claim.” The company implements extensive ML visualizers or sometimes ‘reverse engineers’ the black box models to reason out the triggering of a claim alert. Van Leeuwen: “At FRISS, we firmly believe that the FRISS Score should be a white box, delivering actionable insights using techniques such as visualization.”
A Learned Team, Driven by Synergy
FRISS is not just another software vendor with an excellent analytical AI-based platform. Team FRISS speaks the same language as insurance professionals and fraud investigators. “Our team members in total have more than 1000 years of insurance expertise, which gives our clients an advantage,” cites Van Leeuwen. “Our extensive insurance knowledge is translated into the FRISS Score for fraud, risk and compliance, with which we strive to reach 5x ROI. It is a tool that can be installed quickly with minimal effort of consultants.”
FRISS follows a stringent implementation methodology that translates into successful outcomes. During this process, FRISS works closely with customers to assess the value of their solutions. These conversations lead to acquiring new knowledge about customer needs. This customer insight is brought into the FRISS roadmap for future versions of solutions. The company does not stop there. FRISS is constantly researching new data sources and fraud detection techniques to enhance their solutions. FRISS invests heavily in its product to deliver the best score possible, elevating the standard of honest insurance.
As fraud-fighting in the insurance industry enters a new era of AI and predictive analytics, there is a growing demand for the fraud analytics system to take a collaborative approach to better address fraud challenges.
Although there are basic collaboration data sources available today, like claims databases, fraud registrations, and national fraud bureaus to identify and tackle fraudsters, the industry needs a wider platform that can unite them to stop the fraudulent activities. FRISS fits the bill with its data source merging capabilities found in their fraud analytics platform.
With collaboration emerging as the backbone of fraud fighting, FRISS has recently launched an initiative, FraudTalks.com. This initiative started off as a conference for fraud-fighting professionals to deliver their TED Talk-like pitch, but it has expanded into a much larger forum where professionals passionate about fighting fraud can connect. This initiative is experiencing colossal success and is expected to gain more exposure in the near future.
The Promise of Excellence
The process of delivering unparalleled solutions for honest insurance is underpinned with the promise of ‘joy to do business with’ to its customers. Along with this brand promise, its core value: ‘We care and drive’ defines the culture at FRISS. “We hire people who match our core values,” says Van Leeuwen. “Our approach demonstrates our care for customers, partners, and colleagues to listen, help them where required, and deliver the best result. The ‘and’ is about the fact that our people think of solutions instead of problems. As challenges are prevalent all the time, the ‘drive’ signifies our focus on reaching BHAG, our goal of creating the FRISS Score as the worldwide trusted standard for honest insurance by 2025.” FRISS aims to continue delivering the best FRISS Score enabling customers to assess the risks and meet compliance. With a culture that provides people the freedom to make mistakes, learn and develop, the company’s workforce has room to think outside the box and enthusiastically support FRISS’ motto.
FRISS has achieved stellar heights ever since their bootstrap start 11 years ago and is determined to standardize the FRISS Score across the globe, leveraging the learnings from its customer base and paying back customers in the form of its avant-garde solutions. After a round of Series A investment in December 2017, the company has committed to spread its footprint to North America and Latin America, by opening a US headquarters in Chicago and FRISS is planning to open an office in Latin Americain the first quarter of 2019. FRISS’ focus will always be delivering solutions to best tackle fraud. Relying on the AI knowledge acquisition continuum and its subsequent application, FRISS aims to create an ideal platform that becomes the benchmark for trust worthy, honest insurance.
