Dhe insurer Talanx wants to work with the start-up Neodigital to produce software for itself and other insurers. To this end, the Talanx subsidiary HDI and the Saarland insurtech company have founded a joint venture. Together they want to develop software for digital claims processing in property-casualty insurance and then sell it to competitors as an individually adaptable solution.
“Our claims system is reaching the limits of automation,” said HDI board member Christopher Lohmann of the FAZ. “There were various options from which we decided to make a new claims system in a co-development with Neodigital.” Neodigital has under won 400,000 customers with digital liability and household insurance, among other things, and geared its own computer system to fast payouts and rapid communication. Car insurance plans to start soon.
“We have collected a lot of claims data and now we want to combine it with insights and data from the HDI,” said Stephen Voss, Founder and CEO of Neodigital. This allows you to further develop your own technology model. The system should be designed in such a way that it can also be used by other insurers with a few adjustments. The joint venture has no employees of its own, but can use the resources of both partners as required. It is designed to make a profit.
There were three options, this is the middle ground
HDI was faced with the question of whether to use the standard software from an IT provider in the future or develop its own system. As a third option, cooperation with Neodigital came into play. “Based on the high-performance platform of a successful insurtech, we are jointly developing a claims system tailored to our needs,” said Lohmann. In the joint venture, both partners share management. At the same time, HDI is also buying shares in Neodigital, in which the former AWD boss Carsten Maschmeyer is also involved with his investment company.
Neodigital has been a late bloomer in the wave of start-ups in the insurance industry since 2015. However, the management consists of several experienced managers in the industry who have reached the limits of digitization in established companies. Instead of continuing to try higher levels of automation in a very conservative environment with little willingness to change, they preferred to found their own digital insurer from scratch, in which many processes are automated, from application to claims processing to payment.
“Nowadays, speed is no longer a hygiene factor, but contributes to the service expectations of customers,” says Voss. Consumers have become accustomed to the services of digital companies such as Amazon or Ebay and have created new expectations of their transparency. The joint venture offers the advantage of being able to better feed the analytics of artificial intelligence with data from a large insurer.
Both sides benefit from the knowledge of the other partner, say the two. “Two competent partners are joining forces here,” said Lohmann. Together they could create an application that could be useful anywhere in the market. “We achieve a quality enhancement of our existing processes through more data,” said Voss. The speed of the newcomer is combined with the solidity of the customer experience of an established company.