QBE Insurance Group has announced that its venture capital arm, QBE Ventures, has closed an investment into machine learning tech firm Hyperscience, and has entered into an agreement to roll out its solutions across QBE globally.
Hyperscience uses artificial intelligence (AI) to develop solutions for automating office work across verticals like re/insurance, financial services, health, and governments.
It aims to reduce companies’ dependencies on costly, slow, and error-prone manual data entry operations by automating the transformation of human-readable content into machine-readable data, and with greater speed and accuracy than legacy data capture technologies.
This allows clients to facilitate straight-through-processing, achieve faster customer response times, and unlock data that has otherwise been trapped in static or unsearchable documents.
David McMillan, Group Chief Operations Officer (COO) at QBE Insurance Group, said: “This is a practical use of artificial intelligence that will, in a short time, add tangible value to our business.
“From driving operational efficiency to unlocking a wealth of new data and insights, HyperScience has delivered a platform that will support QBE’s objectives of delivering “Brilliant Basics” in underwriting, pricing and claims.”
Ted Stuckey, Managing Director of QBE Ventures, added: “QBE Ventures backs companies which are working on technically-challenging and industry-changing ideas. We are excited to work with the HyperScience team to help build a future in which humans and machines benefit from working side-by-side, excelling at what each does best.”
Hyperscience’s products have already been used to double the processing throughput for the wealth management client account forms of global financial services companies.
The tech firm has also applied its machine learning solutions to ongoing file migration projects, having in some cases successfully quadrupled processing throughput when compared with pre-existing manual approaches.
Peter Brodsky, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of HyperScience, also commented: “QBE has been a great partner for HyperScience. Like many other large enterprises, they are excited about the promise of AI and ML, but they also appreciate that each step needs to deliver practical value for their customers today.
“We’ve started with manual data entry because it’s where we can immediately have a meaningful impact on a pervasive problem, but our roadmap takes us beyond that. For example, we’re working together with QBE to rethink key aspects of their operational platform in a way that enables them to serve their customers in a more scalable, effective, and personalized manner.”
This partnership with Hyperscience marks the third investment made by QBE Ventures since its launch in 2017.
