PremFina Ltd, the U.K.’s first venture capital backed alternative insurance premium finance company announces its UK collaboration with Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software company by revenue, has resulted in its artificial intelligence (AI) driven chat bot handling 70% of all data-led customer queries with zero delay in response times.
PremFina’s newest (virtual) staff member ‘Fina’ visible, was developed at the company’s research and development (R&D) labs in collaboration with Microsoft. It tapped into Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform for a variety of AI libraries and technologies to create an AI-driven chatbot to be first line of response for incoming queries from business customers and consumers. Natural language processing allows PremFina’s algorithms to recognize the customer’s intent, even if the words are unclear, and then process appropriate follow up actions.
“Whether customers ask how, where or if they can make a payment in a variety of ways, Fina will respond and direct them to our payment gateway,” said PremFina’s CTO Nij Saha. “Fina processes varying expressions of human language and help serve our customers 24×7 through human style interaction.”
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One in five companies that had adopted AI attributed 5% percent of their organizations’ enterprise-wide earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to their use of AI, according to a Nov. 2020 survey by management consultancy firm McKinsey & Co. Many companies have increased their investment in AI in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant acceleration of digitisation across business functions, widening the digital divide between led and technology laggard companies.
“This is a textbook case of technology put to use for business efficiency and an improved customer journey,” said PremFina’s CEO Bundeep Singh Rangar. “”Our newest employee Fina is uber efficient handline 7 out of every 10 incoming chat queries that don’t need to be handed over to a human being.”
Fina allows for customers to ask questions via simple conversations, using natural language processing technologies to understand the intent behind the questions. It provides responses to customers 24×7 across different regions. Built during a virtual hackathon last year, it is the first of many outcomes via the company’s collaboration with Microsoft.
“Premfina is recognized as being highly innovative and focused on providing excellent customer experience for insurance companies and intermediaries,” said Dennis Vanderlip, Director, Financial Services at Microsoft UK. “Microsoft is excited to be working with PremFina as it brings new solutions to market in this important sector.”
PremFina’s work with Microsoft is helping it build new innovative products that improve customer experience and lower operating costs. The company’s core loan engine platform is another such example. It can scale up to process any increase in loan agreements in real time using Azure, via only a few clicks on a computer. PremFina was also part of the Microsoft UK Ventures 4th Cohort for fintech start-ups in 2016.
In Sept. 2018, PremFina’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) was recognised at the Insurance Times Tech and Innovation Awards where the Company won ‘Best Use of Technology for Customer Experience – B2B.
