The insurance industry has become more digital in recent yearsas its reliance on data and technology has grown. Despite this,many insurers and insureds still rely on paper — especially when itcomes to claims.

Claims professionals will be the first to tell you howtime-consuming the paperwork can be. As a former claiminsurance attorney in Washington D.C., Chris Cheatham is nostranger to sorting through a sea of papers. He usuallyrepresented insurance companies against the federal government orin cases involving large construction projects.

One day he realized the papers he was reviewing “were alwaysreally unorganized and it was costing my companies, who werethe large carriers, a lot of money.” Within the insurance industry,he would hear of professionals turning to X-Acto knives orExcel spreadsheets; others were simply redlining in order tocompare policies and find exclusions. And the job became even morelabor intensive when the insurance professional was comparingpolicies from more than one insurer, which is often the case withlarge businesses.

In 2012, Cheatham would go on to launch ClaimJet. It allowedusers to scan documents and collect electronic data, as wellas upload the documents to the software for the accountants,lawyers, consultants who were managing these claims. Two yearslater, the company found itself working on a large claim. At thesame time, underwriters started logging into the software for thefirst time; soon, someone asked to use the software for policyreview.

“It feels like that led to this giant rabbit hole that is nowRiskGenius,” says Cheatham.

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Connecting information

Risk Genius, developer of the RiskGenius Platforms,utilizes highly specialized algorithms and artificialintelligence to organize the world's insurancepolicy information for carriers, brokers andcommissioner offices.

Cheatham, CEO and co-founder of ClaimKit Inc., says thecompany targets “specialty underwriters and brokers and thenthe regulators that are working with them” because that'swhere they've found the most nuanced language.By specialty, he means commercial property &casualty carriers, which is the company's primary focus.In the future, there are plans to expand to all realms ofinsurance and beyond, augmenting the human efforts, not replacingthem.

But Cheatham knows the company can't expand too fastbecause ”we need to nail insurance before we go otherstuff.” This, plus the two challenges heanticipates — managing the sales cycle and helpingpartners understand how to engage with RiskGenius and vice versa —have Cheatham focused just on the insurance industry for now.

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The first partnership

“The ultimate goal is to connect all this information. If youhave a contract that has insurance requirements, how does thatconnect to the insurance policy itself?” says Cheatham.

In Oct. 2017, RiskGenius announced the company's first industrypartnership with QBE Ventures. QBE North American was the firstdivision to fully implement the RiskGenius Platform, with plansalready in place to upload 125,000 policy documents in 2018.

“QBE North America completed a proof-of-concept of theRiskGenius Platform earlier this year, and saw great resultsleveraging the company's proprietary, machine learning product tocompare policies as part of our product development process,” saidBob James, group head of transformation for QBE, in a statementlast year.

Using machine learning, the RiskGenius Platform quickly andeasily interprets, organizes and standardizes policy language. Suchorganization and standardization helps underwriters, brokers andregulators understand the trends inherent to complex coverages.

“My mantra is free the forms,” says Cheatham. “I think we needto make forms available to more people so they can understand thelanguage, and a lot of those, especially in commercial insurance,are kind of hidden from view. The more brokers and carriers caninteract and understand that stuff, the better.”

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