Experts | Luanna Eroles in interview for Insurtech Community Hub
How would you define Samplemed’s identity and approach in the life and health market within the insurance sector?
We believe we were born to enable life insurance to be accessible to an increasing number of people through assertive and thorough risk analysis. That’s why we transformed our over 35 years of medical and underwriting knowledge assisting reinsurance companies and insurers into technology and now want the Spanish public to access our solutions.
Could you share examples of innovative projects in which Samplemed is working to improve or transform the relationship between the life insurance sector and insurers?
Sure, we have some clients from the USA with over 20-year contracts, and they are still with us. The first contact was due to cross-border tele-interviews and paramedical exams, which at that time in history were highly innovative. So, we have always been there in the market.
Today from top tech and innovation I can emphasize that we have developed the first life underwriting websemantics in the market. This achievement is fundamental, as it enables real applications of artificial intelligence with knowledge gathered by a team of over 10 doctors as well as life insurance underwriting experts and our taxonomy team. It is the core of our interactive underwriting manual, and empowers new levels of accelerated underwriting and automation. It is so impactful that we are proud to share that in the first year in the market, we onboarded 5 Reinsurers and Insurers in a new automated or accelerated underwriting process in our digital underwriting workbench – the s.360.
What do you consider to be the biggest challenges for the success of integration between the insurance sector and life insurance analysis today?
Life underwriting relies heavily on expert advice and doctor underwriters, and Data protection legislation, as well as a decentralized process, make receiving and processing essential information complex and slow. Traditionally, paperwork has been a challenge, but this is a gap that can now be bridged by digital solutions arising in the market, especially by someone with deep medical knowledge, like Samplemed.
How does Samplemed view its role in addressing these challenges and improving underwriting efficiency for the insurance sector?
We offer through our product the best of our human knowledge and intelligence in underwriting in the form of a tailor-made Saas for Life underwriting. We are committed to continuing to lead the forefront in transforming life insurance underwriting by continuously leveraging these innovative technologies.
What opportunities does Samplemed identify at the intersection between medical technology and life insurance?
We know that underwriting is not an exact science, it’s an art. People still work with very centralized knowledge and have their own ways of working. Technology serves to open the doors of imagination, and instead of combating the imprecision of underwriters’ work, we want to empower them so that the tool captures the essence of the subscriber and serves as their assistant. Technology will never replace underwriters, but we want our system to be a source of security, inspiration, and continuous innovation for life insurance underwriting teams.
How have you delivered this? Could you explain a bit about your new Saas s.360?
Of course! Our s.360 platform is more than a set of tools; it’s a comprehensive ecosystem. It combines UDWebsemantics with automated flows of accelerated underwriting, analyzing cases and coding risks to serve as data in the Insurer’s particular Data Lake. We have predictive models, video interviews, or online questionnaires in an underwriting work platform. It’s the best friend of Life Insurance Companies and Underwriters.
How has digital transformation impacted how Samplemed collaborates with insurers compared to previous years?
We were already digital long before the digital transformation, so we weren’t greatly affected by that market demand. In fact, the pandemic helped us a lot to grow because it made insurers worldwide recognize the urgency to change their way of working.
But from the insurers’ side, digital transformation has brought legislation and restrictions on data usage, such as GDPR measures, and systems that don’t have a data philosophy can become a black box, where underwriting and business intelligence actions and insights occur but no one can access. That’s why we offer a solution within our tool that opens the doors to innovation and data usage through structured medical data in our proposal’s Data Lake.
Could you share a project or initiative Samplemed is currently working on to optimize the efficiency of underwriting data usage for insights and business strategies in Life Insurance?
I can point to the Data Lake module I mentioned earlier. We have in the tool a Data Lake individualized by the client that uses anonymous applicant data to generate analyses and informative panels compliant with LGPD. This allows our data scientists to access tracked medical content without revealing personal information. Additionally, we have advanced predictive models that assess the risk of each applicant, providing accurate real-time evaluations, and all insurers using our platforms can use the data produced in the system to build their own predictive models.
In your perspective, how do you foresee the evolution of the relationship between the insurance sector and the health sector in the coming years and how is Samplemed preparing for these changes?
Many technology companies are automating underwriting, but almost nobody is automating life underwriting because it is the most specific and complex case to be automated. That’s why we believe we have a lot to offer, as we see a market with few specialists at our level. Insurers can advance in their medical underwriting processes more than they imagine without having to use generic technologies designed for other insurance products. With Samplemed’s solutions, we offer the best of medicine for insurance to our clients through the various modules of our SaaS s.360.
But solutions like yours today are only presented to the market through Reinsurers, and they are usually software with very expensive annual licenses. Would this solution also be available to medium or small-sized insurers? What is your commitment to democratize – as you yourselves said – technology in life underwriting?
Well, for those who don’t know us, we were born in South America and are currently active with clients in more than 6 countries. For mid and small size insurance companies we are certainly the best option for life insurance automation platforms outside the Reinsurers’ Quartier. Due to currency and exchange, we offer our platform for a third of the price of the market, so I can say that regarding democratizing technology, we are quite competitive…
Interviewer: Very interesting. I see good winds with an inverted trajectory – South America coming to influence the Big Brother United States of America. We will be following Samplemed’s progress, keep us always updates about the news.
Alright, I will.
Thank you for sharing these highlights and for your time today!
It has been a pleasure. We are excited to continue developing pioneering technologies in life insurance underwriting. Thank you for the opportunity to share our progress! We believe that together, as individuals, partners, and a market, we fly higher. 2024 will be a great year for all of us. I wish all readers the best this year and brazilian hugs.
About Luanna
Luanna Eroles has worked with digital products at Samplemed for 5 years, she was the PO of the s.360 project and is now in charge of the Internationalization of this SaaS. Specialized in UX Design, she came from the digital entertainment sector to enrich the visions of the Insurance market with the best and most innovative practices in usability, aesthetics and digital learning. Along with Luanna, Samplemed’s leadership team has 3 PhDs and 4 master’s degrees in Information Technology or Data Science.