Aviva soars high with an SBR win in the analytics - life insurance category

Their Anomalous Adviser Detection safeguards consumer interests and raise the professionalism of financial advisers.

With roughly S$13.5 billion in assets, Aviva is no stranger when it comes to offering a comprehensive suite of insurance solutions for everyone. Today, the company insures around 1.5 million customers, with the bulk of its growth coming from the financial advisory (FA) channel.

Aviva aims to transform the FA industry by enhancing the industry’s service standards and professionalism. More specifically, they seek to raise the bar of the quality of advisers to better serve customer needs. One of the ways Aviva endeavoured to do so is with its development of an automated solution to pre-empt and deter misconduct.

The solution, known as Anomalous Adviser Detection, builds on identified risk proxies of advisers, which includes concentration of vulnerable customers and complaints history, amongst others. Based on this information, the solution taps on artificial intelligence (AI) and Isolation Forest – an anomaly detection algorithm – to analyse the risk proxies and flag outlier behaviours. The analysis is presented on an Adviser Monitoring Dashboard, and advisers who exhibit high-risk behaviours are placed on a watchlist. A feedback loop is created to improve the model through machine learning for more accurate and effective analysis.

Having a robust monitoring process in place reduces the manpower required for live data collection and the need to conduct random investigations. The Adviser Monitoring Dashboard allows compliance officers to focus their preventive efforts in the right areas, such as increased coaching sessions, re-training, etc..

The solution yielded success in predicting serious misconduct, and Aviva will work on refining the predictions for other misconduct types. If new behaviours outside the watchlist are identified and should there be new complaints received, Aviva can collect more data points to improve the accuracy of the model through the feedback loop.

This ability to proactively and automatically detect risky behaviours of advisers can also be shared with FA firms that Aviva works with. It can also be taken beyond the life insurance industry and be used across other financial institutions.

The Technology Excellence Awards, presented by Singapore Business Review, was held via studio award presentations and video conferencing sessions throughout the second and third week of April.

This year’s nominations were judged by a panel consisting of Daryl Pereira, Head of Cyber at KPMG; Cheang Wai Keat, Partner, Consulting at Ernst & Young Advisory Pte. Ltd.; Henry Tan, Group Chief Executive Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at Nexia TS; Sivakumar Saravan, Senior Partner at Crowe Singapore; Cecil Su, Director, Head of Cybersecurity of BDO Singapore.

If you would like to join the 2022 awards and be acclaimed for your company’s exceptional technological innovations, please email Jane Patiag at [email protected].