A start-up has launched in New Zealand offering payment reconciliation software - and promises insurers an easy solution to the long and laborious process of reconciling broker payments.
Insurance Business talked to Grappler co-founders Colleen MacCarthy and Alistair Harold, who explained the key aims and benefits of the relatively unknown niche product.
“There are a lot of insurance start-ups looking at reinventing the front end of the insurance model,” says Harold. “But we saw that the back end side is still very heavily legacy based. There are a lot of processes that are still quite manual, particularly in the broker reconciliation and credit control space, and that’s where Grappler came from.”
The current process for reconciling payments between brokers and insurers takes massive amounts of manpower, data handling and format conversion. Grappler aims to streamline this into a single, easy process.
“We were very surprised that insurers were still doing this the manual way,” says MacCarthy. “It seems to be the accepted standard process, where the solution is simply to throw more people at the task.”
“With our product, you’re dealing with a big change in scale,” she explains. “Converting data formats with manual intervention always takes time and effort, and accuracy is also a huge challenge. Imagine having five thousand rows of payments, and trying to match those to five thousand policies each month before month’s end. Grappler reduces the tedious task of reconciling each payment, and allows staff to focus on the more skilled tasks involving the outstanding deals.
“So far, the only concept of this in the industry has been ANZ talking about blockchain. Aside from that, there hasn’t been any talk about streamlining this process. It is still a largely untouched niche, and we’re gaining some great traction.”
Grappler utilises AI technology to reconcile payments, and the company’s foundation clients include several major Australian and New Zealand insurers.
“Large insurers have now started to come around to start-ups like us, which is fairly new for them,” says Harold. “But we can give them the security that we don’t need to touch their legacy systems – all we do is take a feed from their system, and this really cuts down on the friction of moving from one system to another.”
“Ultimately all of those payments need to be reconsolidated, and if that doesn’t happen the insurer will be left with lots of outstanding policies,” adds MacCarthy. “Roughly 50-60% of all data is reconciled when processed manually, but the machine model will reconcile about 95%.
“It’s a very tangible and measureable result, and that’s the key objective.”
