Applied Systems announced the acquisition of Cytora, a digital risk processing platform for the insurance industry, in an effort to accelerate connecting the dots within the insurance ecosystem, something Applied terms as the \u201cDigital Roundtrip of Insurance.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAt Applied, we are committed to being the leading specialist in insurance AI solutions for both agencies and carriers,\u201d said Taylor Rhodes, CEO, Applied Systems, in a statement. Cytora is the ultimate example of insurance-focused AI, according to Rhodes. \u201cTheir commitment to leveraging advanced AI capabilities to accelerate and streamline the digitization, exchange, and prioritization of risk data between agents and carriers fits perfectly with our vision of the Digital Roundtrip of Insurance,\u201d he said when releasing the news.<\/p>\n
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Cytora\u2019s platform is an insurance focused generative and agentic AI model that digitizes commercial risk transfer workflows. New business submissions are one area where Cytora\u2019s digitization can speed up the risk review process, said Graham Blackwell, president of Applied Systems.<\/p>\n
Related: By Taming Big Data With AI, Cytora Aims to Transform Commercial Underwriting<\/a><\/p>\n For example, information for a new business submission might be captured and then turned into a PDF. \u201cAnd where does that PDF go? Well, it gets emailed to 10, 12, 15 different insurers so they can evaluate the risk,\u201d Blackwell said. \u201cAnd what they do? They take that information, key it all in manually. They plug into their underwriting workbench so they can decide if they want to the risk,\u201d he explained. That process takes a lot of time, he said. In addition, \u201cwe have found that 30%, 40%, 50% of the time in that process the carrier never returns a quote \u2026 it\u2019s too much work. It\u2019s too much cost, and they simply don\u2019t get back to the agency. They don\u2019t get back to the insured,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat a terrible experience for everybody,\u201d Blackwell said. \u201cThe carrier is not actually underwriting the risk that they want. The insured doesn\u2019t know the status of their [insurance] quote and the agency is just chasing people down.\u201d<\/p>\n Richard Hartley, co-founder and CEO of Cytora, told Insurance Journal that the combination of Applied\u2019s scale with Cytora\u2019s ability to improve the process and control over risk selection, is a game changer. There is a huge opportunity in the commercial insurance industry to improve the workflow process from submission to binding, he said. AI can help.<\/p>\n \u201cThe insurance industry is really inefficient in how brokers send risks to insurers,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you are writing commercial insurance, 40% of your time today is absorbed by reading and interpreting submission data.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are highly skilled underwriters who really should be making decisions on risks. But what they are actually doing is spending 40% to 50% of their time just manually reading and interpreting in a very monotonous way.\u201d<\/p>\n Hartley says the Cytora platform uses large language models, artificial intelligence, to digitize that information automatically.<\/p>\n \u201cIt dramatically speeds up and streamlines that process, really benefiting agents and brokers, but also really benefiting insurance companies because they can write higher volumes of risk,\u201d Hartley explained.<\/p>\n Hartley said Cytora\u2019s vision for the future of the industry directly aligns with Applied\u2019s vision to connect and automate the Digital Roundtrip of Insurance. \u201cWe are excited to join Applied to significantly expand the value of insurance AI at each stage of the risk lifecycle, bringing the industry closer together and enabling more profitable growth for all stakeholders,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Cytora is a configurable platform so it can be used to digitize the full policy lifecycle \u2013 from submission to claims servicing, mid-term adjustments, endorsements, and renewals, the release said. \u201cCytora\u2019s document-to-data platform enables users in both agencies and carriers to reduce the time and cost incurred in the most critical insurance workflows in radical ways.\u201d<\/p>\n This includes turning information from disparate data sources \u2013 both structured (e.g., ACORD forms) and unstructured sources (documents, PDFs, Excel and CSV files, emails, images), into decision-ready transactions fulfilling each participant\u2019s view of risk, the companies said.<\/p>\n The goal is to create a dynamic back and forth experience for the industry, Blackwell said.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one is keying in information. There aren\u2019t all these emails and phone calls back and forth. There aren\u2019t all these logs,\u201d he said. Blackwell expects that the future will include building out more of Cytora\u2019s AI capabilities to other areas where better interactions between insurance partners are needed.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s a proven AI platform as it is, Hartley added. It\u2019s \u201cready to use and is flexible across all lines of business, all transaction types and workflows from new business to renewals to midterm adjustments, to claims to invoices and many others,\u201d Hartley added. \u201cAnd it\u2019s also completely flexible and configurable to each insurer\u2019s view of risk.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s an exciting time in the insurance tech world, he added. Because it takes the workflow relationship from what seems like \u201ca black hole\u201d where agents and brokers might be asking, \u201c\u2018Did you receive the submission? I haven\u2019t had a response,’\u201d Hartley said. And turns that \u201cblack hole into this really highly interactive form of communication, which I think is really sympathetic to how agents and underwriters want to do business today,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cThe result of this combination will unlock growth and create significant productivity for all stakeholders in the industry,\u201d Applied\u2019s statement said. \u201cOur collective technology assets, insurance domain expertise, and vast insurance data sets \u2013 combined with the power of AI \u2013 will deliver speed, accuracy, and cost advantages across all the critical workflows involved in the insurance lifecycle.\u201d<\/p>\n Insurance Advisory Partners LLC acted as exclusive financial advisor to Cytora in this transaction. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.<\/p>\n \n Topics
\n Mergers & Acquisitions<\/a>
\n InsurTech<\/a>
\n Data Driven<\/a>
\n Artificial Intelligence<\/a>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Applied Systems announced the acquisition of Cytora, a digital risk processing platform for the insurance industry, in an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[6365,6366,345,343,344,6367,85,46,6368,6369,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-5149","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-6365","9":"tag-agents-brokers","10":"tag-ai","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-business-moves-mergers","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel","16":"tag-pc-companies","17":"tag-reinsurance","18":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}