Comments(14)

Comment by Gillian Buzzard at 2:04 pm on 8 June 2007

Hi Rod

You might want to add the recently launched online service from life insurers, Pinnacle Life, to your list. A key distinction with the two you have mentioned is that theirs is true e-commerce, i.e. you nail your life insurance cover, in minutes, in the one online transaction. Check it out at: http://www.pinnaclelife.co.nz and their blog at http://blog.pinnaclelife.co.nz. Both were launched last month.

Cheers
Gillian





Comment by likeminded at 9:58 pm on 8 June 2007

so, Rod.

Kordia are buying Orcon. What’s your thoughts on that?





Comment by Nick Bryant at 7:31 pm on 10 June 2007

Hi Gillian,

you may not have spent adequate time looking at the Maestro site; as its General Manager I can tell you in no uncertain terms that you can “nail your life insurance cover, in minutes, in the one online transaction” on Maestro - a big attraction of the site being that you have the choice of three providers, not one (as with Pinnacle), and all of them highly rated for the breadth and value of their cover.

Also, you can “nail” trauma, income protection and heatlth insurance “in the one online transaction” at Maestro, from a choice of TOWER, Asteron and FidelityLife (and soon a fourth provider) as well as apply for a home loan.

I feel bad making this clarification on Rod’s site, but I’d be a fool to let you suggest Maestro isn’t “true e-commerce” when it is a complete end-to-end insurance (and mortgage) solution.

Kind regards,

Nick

(sorry Rod, I didn’t mean this to be gratuitous sales pitch - merely setting the record straight)





Comment by Glenn at 8:01 pm on 10 June 2007

I might be wrong but the Pinnacle site will actually accept your risk and put you “on cover” immediately as long as you meet certain criteria whereas Maestro is simply emailing your application to the provider ? They will not cover you until the risk is underwritten and accepted ?

There is a big difference isn’t there. Correct me if I’m wrong…

BTW The pinaccle quote function seems a bit flaky, sometimes comes up with a blank screen





Comment by Nick Bryant at 8:52 pm on 10 June 2007

Hi Glenn,

you’re right about the Maestro process, you’ll need to be underwritten - during which time (a week or so) you’ll have accidental death cover - but the Pinnacle example of being “on cover” appeared to me, when I tried their site, to be good in theory but inpractical in reality.

Why?

Because (it appears - and I did three variations of the application) that you can only get cover if you answer “no” to every one of thirty or so questions about medical history and lifestyle, i.e. the standard underwriting process. Answer “yes” to any of those questions on Pinnacle and you get a notice that says you can’t be covered immediately and will need to be assessed for suitablility for coverage by Pinnacle, i.e. you’ll need to wait for them to do a detailed underwrite.

So, Pinnacle’s claim - from what I have been able to ascertain - is right, you can be covered immediately, but my guess is that only a very tiny percentage of people could go through a life application and answer no to everything - no surgery, no asthma, no family history of anything major, no dangerous pastimes…

That being the case, I’d suggest the sites are very similar but Maestro offers choice, and big brand suppliers whose products attract high grades in independent ratings.

Does that answer your question?

Thanks,

Nick





Comment by Falafulu Fisi at 12:41 am on 11 June 2007

I agree here Rod, that in the space of financial services, there are some emerging local companies that do develop products that are competitive in the international market such as Finzsoft.

I myself is developing a financial mathematical API to be used as a core library in an application to be developed which is similar but not exactly the same to one described in the following Herald article.

Humans made redundant as super-trader does the sums.

I am hoping to persuade some other developers (software architects) to join me , in developing the systems down the line, when the first stage (core finance mathematical API) is completed, since I only allocate a fraction of my time to this effort at the moment.





Comment by Ed Saul at 11:46 am on 11 June 2007

Hi Rod, Ed Saul here, Partner at Pinnacle Life. Thanks for providing space for this useful exchange. I don’t want to turn it into an epic debate but I must respond to Nick’s points above.

Pinnacle Life is the only life insurance company enabling consumers to issue themselves a policy immediately online. The entire process can be completed in 46 mouse-clicks, within 10 minutes or less.

There are other models that simply offer an on-line application form. After you download the pdf, it’s back to paper, post and signatures. This isn’t true e-commerce.

Nick’s right - for full cover policies need to be underwritten, which is why it takes time with the ‘traditional’ insurers. Pinnacle Life is the first to offer immediate life cover because we’ve built electronic underwriting into the website itself, a huge innovative step for the industry which has been picked up, even in the UK, by industry commentators: http://www.privatehealth.co.uk/healthinsurance/hot-topics/instant-quote

But the point made about being unable to get cover unless you answer ‘no’ to all questions is simply not true. For example, if you have asthma or high blood pressure and it’s controlled, you can still get immediate cover. And if you have a dangerous occupation or pastime, a loading is immediately offered. There are a number of other questions where ‘yes’ does not automatically exclude you from immediate cover.

Most importantly, I am delighted to say that so far more than half of our applicants have qualified for immediate cover online.

Cheers
Ed Saul
http://www.pinnaclelife.co.nz





Comment by Nick Bryant at 1:26 pm on 11 June 2007

Hi Ed,

thank you for the excellent explanation; it’s clarified things for me and has answered my incorrect assumption about whether a “yes” answer ruled one out of gaining immediate cover - to be able to apply loadings to some fields automatically is clever, so well done. I hope you’ll forgive me making the assumption after having “struck out,” so to speak, in the three applications I did - perhaps I only answered yes to some of the most major health or behavioural questions.

Also, just in case there is any confusion regarding Maestro’s process, in regard to this sentence… “There are other models that simply offer an on-line application form. After you download the pdf, it’s back to paper, post and signatures. This isn’t true e-commerce.” … To be fair, in the case of Life or the other three lines of cover offered on Maestro, what’s filled in online is the substantive part of the application (about 98%), which we then email to the chosen provider who begins the underwriting process immediately to save time - only the Direct Debit form and Declaration needs to be printed and signed, which is all of one minute’s time to completed (because a physical signature is still required by our partner companies before they will activate the full policy - applicants do have accidental death cover from the moment of submission though). We’ve introduced protocols to make this as seamless as possible; we mail the documents to applicants to complete and free post them back to us, or they can chose to download, complete and freepost them to us. This is currently the only old-economy part of the process and is a fact of life at present because we are an independent agent offering the consumer choice, rather than a vertically integrated insurer that has taken their product online like you. We don’t consider this final step a major hinderance to sales, but to the extent that it is I also don’t think we’ll only have to live with it for 24 months at the most, by which time end-to-end e-filing will be secure and cost effective enough for us to upgrade the process. I look forward to that, but am also very happy to be in the market, capable of making such an upgrade at a time when our brand has (hopefully) become an established and trusted provider of financial products.

Again, thanks for your post, and good luck.

Kind regards,

Nick





Comment by Raf at 1:44 pm on 11 June 2007

It’s certainly about time we had more online capacity in the financial services industry. Though at first examination Maestro is just a simple broker owned by Lombard a financial services company. I did find the instant quote process useful though the mortgage process was an application form. I want to know the best available rates and their conditions before filling out the form.

There is massive opportunity in the financial services space but simply transferring systems online is just part of it. When one looks at the profits taken out by the financial services industry the mind boggles.

Thanks Falafulu for the link to that story. I’m also in this space and have been working on market algorithms for a few years. I would be interested in hearing from you and what you are up to so drop me a line. One of our shareholders is ex renaissance technology.





Comment by Nick Bryant at 2:07 pm on 11 June 2007

UPDATE: If anyone who has been keeping tabs on this little dialogue asked themselves, well, if Maestro’s an independent agent, and Pinnacle’s application process is web enabled, why doesn’t Maestro Pinnacle become one of Maestro’s partner insurance providers?

It’s early days, but thanks to Rod highlighting Maestro’s launch here that scenario might just occur - Maestro and Pinnacle will be meeting to learn more about each other on Wednesday.

Cheers,

Nick





Comment by Ben Kepes at 2:12 pm on 11 June 2007

Beautiful - now THERE is the value in the modern economy - members build networks, networks build communities, communities articulate their wishes and business listens and reacts

progress2.0





Comment by Glenn at 2:22 pm on 11 June 2007

Ok we’ve put that one to bed now perhaps someone from TripleJump could “jump in” and explain how they are different from any other insurance/investment broker and how exactly they are leveraging technology as Rod suggests ?

There doesn’t seem to be any e-commerce functionality to their website at all ??

Or am I missing something obvious ?





Comment by Falafulu Fisi at 2:41 pm on 11 June 2007

I thought that these references would be of interest to finance vendors who are involved in the discussion here in terms of product development. Only the abstracts are shown, however you can buy those papers online.

#1) A fuzzy expert system approach to insurance risk assessment using FuzzyCLIPS

#2) Fuzzy logic in insurance

Using fuzzy expert systems is much more robust than using crisp (true or false) logic expert systems, because fuzzy systems can deal with human nature of vagueness & imprecision where crisp systems only deal with black-or-white situation. I can see from Ed’s post that his system uses crisp logic (true & false) since there is some answers are either “yes” or “no”. There is nothing wrong with crisp logic, it is that the nature of the application requires fuzziness, such as the age of the applicant can be specified as {very_young, young, middle_age, old, very_old} rather than specified as young [between 1 and 18], middle_age [between 19 and 40] , old [ between 41 and 60], etc,…

There are more publications on the subject with application to management science which are available from the University of Auckland, School of Engineering and here are 2 very popular Journals : Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing and IEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems

Dig for Reference #2 in the IEEE Fuzzy journal for 1994 volume, if you’re not going to buy the paper online but prefer to photocopy it from the bound print at University.

If you implement these technologies your finance product will be a world beater. If you are looking for commercial API in Fuzzy System, then have a look at this:

Java FuzzyJ

FuzzyJ can be integrated with this popular rule-engine JESS , if you want to develop an insurance fuzzy-expert-systems. So, this means that JESS which is a crisp-logic rule engine is extended by FuzzyJ to be able to develop fuzzy-expert systems.

Finally, here is another publication that covers of how using fuzzy-expert-systems to detect fraudulent insurance claims. You can buy it online.

A fuzzy-based algorithm for auditors to detect elements of fraud in settled insurance claims





Comment by Lance Wiggs at 8:29 pm on 11 June 2007

Maestro and Triplejump - more work required…

Rod Drury points us to start ups Maestro and Triplejump. Good to see these new sites up and running - well done…
But please - go buy the book “Don’t make me think” and apply the learning to your websites:
Let’s start with …





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