CRIF Works with RSA to Strengthen Pet Insurance Fraud Detection

CRIF Decision Solutions has announced that it is providing RSA Insurance with a suite of pet insurance solutions to strengthen its pet insurance fraud detection and reduce the cost of fraudulent pet claims. The seamless technology and data led approach has delivered proven business benefits.

While the vast majority of customers are honest, a small minority are attempting to defraud insurers. Amongst numerous examples, RSA has identified customers non-disclosing prior claims history in order to influence premium; misrepresenting the breed of their pet to avoid associated risk factors or prior claims history, and claims fraud including attempts to upgrade policies to access increased cover limits in order to accommodate ongoing conditions.

Aligned to market developments and equipped to integrate data from multiple external sources, CRIF’s pet solutions enable pet insurers to benefit from the new pet tech on the market, to include wearable tech that monitors pet health. This represents opportunity to innovate and generate competitive advantage using machine learning and AI to analyse data from these new sources, alongside existing intelligence, to inform product development and risk appetite.

CRIF’s suite of pet insurance solutions are end-to-end covering the entire policy life cycle, from point of quote through to and fraud investigation in order to enable insurers to onboard the right customers, for the right risks, at the right price.

They include streamlining risk assessment to inform policy pricing with ‘Radar’; identifying claim anomalies, serial claimants, pre-existing conditions, non-disclosure and misrepresentation of information through the centralised pet claims database ‘CACHE Pet’; and identifying fraud and resolving claims swiftly, informed by evidence-based intelligence via ‘Sherlock Detection’.

Adele Sumner, Head of Counter Fraud and Financial Crime at RSA commented: “The sharing of claims data for the purposes of the prevention and detection of insurance fraud is a principle that has been in place for over thirty years. This method is vital to deter unscrupulous fraudsters from cycling through insurance companies and making fraudulent claims. For example, we have investigated multiple instances of fake documentation being presented to multiple different insurers, and even some cases where pets were reported as lost when they are actually safe at home.

“Fraudsters will look for opportunities across insurance products, so it is important that the industry puts measures in place to detect and deter fraud across our risks, rather than only focusing on areas where it might be more common. It is vital that we invest in the sharing of pet claims data to ensure fraudsters are detected and managed – this is becoming increasingly important as insurers increasingly adopt digital claim journeys.”

Sara Costantini, Director at CRIF Decision Solutions said: “We have collaborated closely with RSA to understand and deliver against their developing needs as the pet insurance market continues to evolve. 17 million UK households own a pet, including 3.2 million new pet owners since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from The Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association. The ABI reports that gross written premium in pet insurance rose to £1.3 billion in 2020, an increase of 6.4%, but the number of policyholders grew by just 1%. We are working to help insurers bring added value to the pet insurance proposition by making it customer centric, competitive and easily accessible. Our portfolio of products continues to develop and the introduction of pet tech wearables providing enriched data sources offers exciting possibilities. Meanwhile I’m delighted to report that over 50% of pet insurance providers are committed to CACHE Pet, the pet claims database launched by CRIF, which has generated a powerful centralised source of claims intelligence previously unavailable to the market.”