Pilotbird : Harnessing the Power of Lifestyle Analytics for Insurance

Evgeny Aleksandrov, CEO and Founder

Unleashing the Potential of Lifestyle Analytics for Insurance

“Pilotbird’s empowers life and health carriers to deliver better insurance outcomes for millions of Americans via group ancillary products ”

It is undeniably tough to build a good business. Ask any successful CEO or business owner, or an investor, and they will tell you that it took them a while to get it right. Recognizing good opportunities takes out of box thinking, domain expertise and inspiration. Building one takes more fundamental qualities of grit, aspiration, risk management and a pinch of magic. Evgeny Aleksandrov realized this to be true during his journey during his career in the financial services sector and with Pilotbird.

While growing up, he was not only encouraged to perceive every “change” as an opportunity but embrace calculated risk to pursue his interests — instilling an entrepreneur mindset from the get-go. In the years that followed, Evgeny for industry-leading companies such as JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey, wearing multiple hats that helped him grow and nurture business acumen. It exposed him to a new culture that valued entrepreneurship, impact, and personal development.

Evgeny started his first entrepreneurial venture in the financial serviceswith Access Square; a B2B FinTech start-up focused on innovating within investment services. The solution connected investors and corporate executives directly without the participation of brokerage firms. Having learned his lessons,Evgeny launched Kiwi, a start-up that offers episodic on-demand injury insurance for people with active lifestyles, leveraging social media analytics. It creates a timely personalized insurance offering that considers an individual’s interests and risk propensity.

And about the time this insurtech start-up was ready to take off, 2020 happened — in other words, COVID-19. With major disruption, the team sawn an opportunity to seize the moment and evolve. In his words, “We rapidly pivoted towards Pilotbird that addressed growing interest from large carriers in the tech stack we had built for Kiwi.”Headquartered in New York, Pilotbird is an insurtech start-up that leverages the power of lifestyle analytics to empower life and health insurance companies. The company primarily focuses on gathering insights from publicly available data—via social media and search sites— to build a segmentation profile of policyholders and prospective customers and help carriers understand them better.In an interview with CIO Applications, Evgeny shares insights about Pilotbird’s offerings and how they benefit insurance carriers. He further elaborates on their client onboarding process while throwing light on the company’s roadmap and customer success stories.

Could you elaborate on the kind of solution Pilotbird provides and how it benefits your customers?

Pilotbird leverages social data points to empower life and health carriers to deliver better insurance outcomes for millions of Americans via group ancillary products. Pilotbird offers out-of- box predictive analytics solutions for risk scoring, member engagement, and fraud detection in group and worksite products. We have workflow tools (i.e., web portal and API) that deliver our machine learning models on social media and apply them across the insurance value chain.In group underwriting, it enriches traditional actuarial risk factors with social data points (e.g., smoking habits, lifestyle choices, high-risk hobbies) to segment cases while staying compliant with regulatory expectations.On member engagement, we support carriers in converting their group policyholders who may have changed employers during the year into individual policies.Our platform is also used to reduce fraud leakage. We support Special Investigation Units (SIU) by surfacing inconsistencies in behavior relative to claims (e.g., claimant of disability policy enjoying a Wednesday afternoon game of golf). Pilotbird’s analytics solutions use publicly available social data to enhance carriers’ capabilities and make insurance products more relevant and cheaper policyholders’ lives.

Please give us an overview of your client’s onboarding process.

At Pilotbird, we recognize every carrier is on its own spot on the curve of technology adoption. We adjust accordingly. After the initial process of understanding our clients’ requirements, we begin with a 3-month pilot on a sample set of policies in the in-force book to demonstrate results and secure early wins. Subsequently, we phase in the expansion of the solution into the existing production workflow. We are easy to work with.Our clients see the elimination of top quantile of risk in group underwriting and 2x model lift in select products. Member engagement has seen industry leading 7 percent click-through rate. In fraud detection, we anticipate a 6 percent reduction in claims leakage. We embrace a collaborative nature when we partner with carriers. My team and I educate our clients to ensure they comprehensively understand our methodology and share their feedback in confidence to improve the solution.

Could you share a client success story with us?

A global Fortune 500 carrier approached us to improve their basic group life risk selection model. We partnered with their actuaries for over four months with weekly review sessions to leverage and validate the use of social data points in underwriting. With our insights from the dataset and carrier’s actuarial experience, we were able to validate improve risk selection and remove bias in the model to align with regulatory expectations. Subsequently, the Pilotbird team built a web portal to consume the risk score and improve underwriters’ workflow.In the end, Pilotbird validated the elimination of the worst risk quantile and improve model lift with expected significant savings.

What does the future hold for Pilotbird?

So far, 2021 has seen a great start to the year. We expanded group risking scoring to cover disability products, secured a round of funding, and engaged in accelerators (e.g., Acceleprise, Plug, and Play). Our claims fraud solution is getting well-deserved attention. As we look to scale, we anticipate increasing our revenue five times this year.