Assisting in insuring

Having digitized and processed over nine million medical bills since operations started four years ago, the website of Varzavand Batliwala’s startup Intelligent Industrial Internet Systems Private Limited (i3systems) states they have analyzed over one million medical claims. "We estimate that this would have resulted in a saving of over 30 million minutes of manual effort” in the area of claim processing alone for their clients in the field of medical insurance, Batliwala told Parsiana on December 2, 2020. For cashless insurance claim processing for one customer, the turnaround fell from four hours to one hour, he elaborated. Reimbursement of expenditure incurred now takes two or three days, down from "anywhere between two weeks to a month… Reduction in customer waiting times for claims and loan disbursements has improved the overall customer experience,” he stated. Batliwala founded the company with collegemate Mallesh Bommanahal. "We realised that there were a lot of inefficiencies in insurance payouts and good technology would make a big difference,” he told us.

"Less than eight percent of the population in India has private insurance,” quoted the entrepreneur. Most insurance companies are therefore focussed on selling more policies. "This is the reason why more than 70% of the startups in the insurtech space focus on assisting insurers with marketing and sales,” he remarked. A combination of the words "insurance” and "technology,” insurtech "refers to the use of technology innovations designed to squeeze out savings and efficiency” in the insurance industry, according to American website Investopedia. Commenting on i3systems’ uniqueness, Batliwala said his company "automates processes to improve efficiency and reduce leakages and frauds.” While they mainly provide technology, the entrepreneur said that they also do end to end data processing for some clients who ask for it. Clients include insurers ICICI Lombard, Bajaj Allianz, Reliance General Insurance and HDFC Ergo among others.
"i3systems’ artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions have helped insurance companies to automate settlement of claims, leading to a reduction in data entry expenses,” wrote Batliwala in response to Parsiana’s request for details. Their technology combines optical character recognition (OCR) technology that converts text and images to machine-readable language. "Our solutions also prevent payment leakages leading to savings of 5-10% per claim,” he stated. i3systems’ underwriting solution has helped insurance companies detect fraudulent data submitted in policy proposals.

In September 2020, the company raised additional funding of USD 1.5 million from Bangalore and Seattle based social impact investor Unitus Ventures, senior executive in the Mahindra Group Zhooben Bhiwandiwala and senior executive with the Reliance Group Alok Agarwal, according to news reports. Existing investors include lawyer and founder of legal services firm AZB Partners Bahram Vakil and entrepreneur Jerxis Vandrevala.
Bhiwandiwala told Parsiana, "the company’s claim processing software is a proprietary AI system which can consume documents/data from any hospital to automatically process claims…and can deliver efficiency and saving across the network of 75,000 hospitals in India, as also the future environment of out-patient (OPD) insurance” that is available in other countries and expected to be introduced in India in a significant manner. "Their (software) models for medical data intelligence can be useful anywhere in the world,” he stated.
The health insurance industry is growing at a very rapid pace (30%+), with private insurance growing faster, according to him. Despite the rapid growth of health insurance, "most processes are still manually driven involving significant paperwork, and subject to both errors and frauds, requiring large scale deployment of low-cost and semi-skilled manpower… Driven by the Covid imperative, digital transformation has become a focus for all companies. This migration to automation is already becoming a stampede.” The number of companies providing insurtech services is far lower than in the fintech space, and will likely see a potentially increased proliferation of entrants,” Bhiwandiwala prophesized.
A certified financial analyst, 32-year-old Batliwala is an alumnus of Campion School and Jai Hind College and holds a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He stated that "after completing his PhD, Mallesh got in touch with me and we decided to start a company together… We knew that we wanted to work on healthcare data.”
With software that can cater to both health and life insurance companies, the entrepreneur noted, "We are approaching other financial services customers, especially in trade finance and the small and medium enterprise lending… Our fully owned subsidiary in the United Arab Emirates recently bagged its first order from a Gulf-based subsidiary of a European insurer.” i3systems’ company strength of over 80 includes data scientists and insurance experts.
Asked his personal views on the community Batliwala stated, "I don’t have any strong views on either intermarriage or the methods of disposal of the dead. I guess that would make me a moderate… Zoroastrianism is about following ‘good thoughts, good words and good deeds.’” His parents Yazdi and Meher are both retired from service.