This startup's AI systems are simplifying processes in the financial services sector

Artificial intelligence firm Arya.ai has been helping ICICI Lombard process health insurance claims in under a minute with its deep learning and neural networks platform for customers needing hospitalisation.

Through this platform, VEGA, Arya.ai is also automating a host of operational processes for the broader banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industry.

“For clients like ICICI Lombard, the end-to-end solution by Arya.ai simplifies complex claims processes with plug-and-play ease,” Arya.ai’s co-founder and chief executive Vinay Kumar Sankarapu told TechCircle. 

Girish Nayak, chief of customer service, operations and technology at ICICI Lombard, said that it took an hour an average to approve cashless claims before the company adopted Arya’s AI technology. He said that this can be considered a leap, given the complexity of understanding medical diagnosis during the claim process. 

“This improvement in response time is extremely helpful in cases requiring emergency medical attention since the cashless request can be processed without any time lapse and treatment can start immediately,” Nayak added. 

He also said that the cost optimisation achieved using Arya’s offerings will eventually lead to affordable premiums and ultimately encourage more Indians to embrace health insurance.

According to Sankarapu, Arya.ai helps financial institutions from the ground up -- from strategising and planning through to deploying, maintaining and integrating complex neural network-based AI systems so as to enable existing business processes to become even more efficient. 

Still awaiting patent approval, the VEGA platform claims to simplify buildout for developers and enterprises and manage the deployment of deep learning-based applications. 

Apart from automating claims, Arya.ai offers deployment of technology for tasks such as autonomous underwriting, insurance fraud detection, credit underwriting and cheque processing.

Companies wanting to use the deep learning capabilities can choose to work with Arya.ai's autonomous platform that comes with pre-configured ‘AI’ autonomous modules to automate or augment decisions. 

Through a standalone enterprise module on the platform, businesses can train 'agents' directly by providing training data for the specific task in the business. These modules can then learn autonomously and optimise for better performance.

Some of the platform’s features include tools simplifying deep learning for enterprises through features like GUI (Graphical User Interface) framework, which aims to make it easy for beginners to build complex neural networks easily, and ‘Simulation AI’ to automate data tasks that best fit clients’ needs.

Arya.ai charges its clients a mutually-agreed commission based on the total number of transactions that are made through VEGA.

Set up in 2013 by Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay graduates Sankarapu and Deekshith Marla, Arya.ai received angel funding from VentureNursery and a pre-Series A cheque from YourNest in 2015. The company was part of acceleration programmes run by Oracle, Societe Generale, Swiss Re and VentureNursery.

Arya.ai also works with Intel and was among three other tech companies invited by the tech giant to its AI Builders Program to access and experiment with new architectures. 

For now, the company is not planning to expand beyond India. 

"India has a working population of around 800 million and less than 10% have health insurance policies,” said Sankarapu. “Less than 40-50% of them have life insurance policies. There is a large market that is yet to see these kind of products. We want India to be the first in the ecosystem to be using AI in financial services and after that we'll plan to expand to Singapore and the UK."