Sunday Steps Forward as Asia's First Truly AI-driven InsurTech

BANGKOK,Aug.8,2019 --The InsurTech boom continues its pace in 2019 with a 155% year-on-year increase in funding. However,while thereare now over a hundredInsurTech companies around the world,only a dozen are considered "full-stack InsurTech" able to providethe customer with a complete end-to-end experience. As an AI-driven insurance company,Sunday's car insurancecombinesgeneral user data such as driver age and car modelis combined with past accident data and external data,such as the number of accidents in the area,to make the price calculation richer,and more accurate. Now,Sunday is applying the same machine learning approach togroup health insurance by taking into consideration everything from demographics to healthcare access.

SUNDAY STEPS FORWARD AS ASIA’S FIRST TRULY AI-DRIVEN INSURTECH

Of the handful located in Asia,India's Acko insures more than 200,000 cars and works with third parties to provide microinsurance products around other companies' services. Acko competes with the "super-fast claims process" and "killer prices" of Digit,who insure everything from smartphones to automobiles. Meanwhile,"China's first complete online insurance company",Zhong An,offers off-the-shelf,pre-calculated property and casualty insurance.

Around the world,machine learning is disrupting the standardised pricing and products of traditional insurance,which use historical data to back-up underwriting decisions and cannot understand the needs of the individual customer.

Based in Thailand,Sunday began by applying AI to build and train risk models using an open-source data science platform. More than 500 predictor variables are cross-calculated by more than 10 machine learning models in real-time. Each risk area is evaluated based on the statistical significance and predictability power of each variable,with the customer benefiting from more accurate risk cost,and personalised offerings.

Every product in Sunday's platform is powered by AI and data,something very few insurers have achieved,globally.An intuitive front-end enablescustomers to customise their own coverage before a cloud-based pricing engine,capable of billions of real-time calculations,instantly offers a tailored price. Over time,the platform could lead to a diverse choice of product categories,as new risks are added and the environment changes.

Sunday Health For Business empowers staff members to adjust their coverage within their given budget,buy extras such as dental or ophthalmic care,or add on coverages for their domestic partner and kids. Using the app,employees can avoid paying any additional costs themselves and enjoy cashless hospital visits,by instantly locating network hospitals nearby. When visiting a hospital outside their network coverage,employees make a claim by seamlessly uploading a photo of the bill via the app,and can then check their claim status from the palm of their hand.

Managers and business owners can use the platform to easily manage employee information and adjust their benefit packages,without any paperwork. Claim statistics can be viewed at a glance,providing valuable insights on the metrics that matter via a simplified dashboard. Human resources personnel are more easily able to help plan their colleagues' health insurance using the claims dashboard,adjust coverage as staff are promoted and save time by bulk-uploading policies when they onboard new staff.

"Sunday's focus is on data and AI. This is so we can build the capability to manage any type of risks as the global risk landscape continues to adapt. However,the true test for any insurer is complex risks,starting with motor and health," says Cindy Kua,Sunday's co-founder and CEO.

Winning last year's AWS Hackathon in Thailand and Southeast Asia,Sunday's data and tech team built a method of vehicle damage self-assessment using image recognition to predict claim cost. The technology could one day become directly commercialised into Sunday's insurance products through customers' smartphones. Once again this year,Sunday's data andtech team developed a chest X-ray automation solution to help radiologists read chest X-ray films that again won first prize at AWS Hackathon Thailand. If widely adopted,it's thought that the solution could save more than 15 million lives throughout Southeast Asia.

Sunday's digital insurance platform offers customizable InsurTech products through an artificial intelligence-driven risk-prediction model. In February,Sunday raised USD 10 million in a Series A funding round led by Vertex Ventures SEA and India.

Kua expects the InsurTech to expand its operations to other markets such as Malaysia,Indonesia and Singapore,and aims to raise significant funding round for its expansion towards next year.

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