Insurtech Firms Attack Life Admin Monsters

"We are transforming an unavoidable high-risk interaction point into a highly beneficial one, ensuring that orphaned policies get assigned to the best agent to service and update the policy," Katzev says.

The other narrowly focused startup, Ushur, says its new SmartMail system can go through huge amounts of bulk customer email and attachments quickly.

Ushur estimates life insurers spend an average of $3.28 per email on triaging and sorting incoming customer email.

"With thousands of emails arriving in bulk to inboxes each month, maintaining staffing levels necessary to ensure timely processing is costly," Ushur says. "The manual process of reviewing email content and attachments, determining purpose and forwarding to the appropriate team is highly inefficient, and it requires an army of staff that could be better utilized on more business-critical tasks."

Ushur says its new system has unique strategies for extracting data out of email and classifying the information in the email.

The system can also respond to simple emails itself. When the system knows what it needs to do, but it's missing important information, such as a birth date or an account number, it can ask the customer for more information, Ushur says.

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