By James Thaler

June 23 - (The Insurer) - Reserv is lowering indemnity costs and improving claims speeds by applying technology to claims handling, co-founder Martha Dreiling told The Insurer TV at this month’s Insurtech Insights USA conference.

“We're three years into our journey to service the core P&C space. And our thesis was, if you looked at the legacy TPA (third-party administrator) market, there were a lot of great things they brought to the industry, but technology is not one thing that they would have historically been known for,” Dreiling said on the same day Reserv announced a $25 million Series B round.

Dreiling, who previously held senior roles at Attune, Rhino and small business lender OnDeck, said Reserv has been able to scale quickly due to strong product demand and product-market fit for an alternative to the legacy TPA market.

“Our thought was, if we could take really great talent and marry it with really great technology, we would have outstanding results. So, three years in, we're about 370 people. We service the U.S. and the UK market,” she said

“I think what we've learned is that MGAs and carriers are really hungry to work with a TPA partner, a claims partner, that has the same level of technical sophistication as they do,” Dreiling said.

Reserv was incubated by Altai Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures. After partnering with several initial insurance carriers, Dreiling said the insurtech TPA has found its approach and philosophy “reduces cycle times for claims, it lowers indemnity costs, and delivers a much better experience for policyholders and claimants".

"The market is hungry for that,” she added.

FASTER CLAIMS

Reserv currently serves core P&C market business lines, including property, general liability and transportation claims.

“We also really service quite … niche lines of business, like fertility insurance or rent security deposit guarantee, because we have a very flexible data architecture that allows us to quickly configure programs, but also quickly customise programs as needed,” Dreiling said.

“Some of the other interesting technology that we have is the ability for AI to triage claims real-time in our platform to prioritise for the adjusters; what's the most important claim, or what's the most important activity that you should be working on first?”

Despite the tech-driven efficiencies, Dreiling said that Reserv keeps caseloads per claims handler a “little bit lower than our competitors”.

“What we found, is that we have technology just powering the adjuster through the entire claims process. So, a core value is we want to automate the mundane, to humanise the complex. But when you do that, your cycle times are faster (and) your throughput is quicker,” she noted.

“And so adjusters don't need large caseloads, they can have much smaller caseloads. They can move through them more quickly and just get claims to resolution faster,” Dreiling said. “So, in some lines of business, we've been able to see that we can deliver faster claims payments, one to two times faster than our competitors.”