ITIC UK 2025 | The application of technology in travel and health insurance
In this first session of ITIC UK 2025, Roi Amir, Sarah Page and Ernesto Suarez discussed how new technologies are influencing the provision of benefits
The ITIJ team are reporting live from ITIC UK in Southampton. Read all the reports here.
Roi Amir, CEO, Sprout.ai
Amir began by explaining that many insurance customers have exceptionally high expectations regarding the claims process.
He cited Sprout.ai data that found that “43% of UK consumers believe their health insurance claim will be processed within a week, while 37% think it will take just a day.” This, Amir said, is despite 56% of UK customers and 45% of US customers having to wait over a month for their claim to be surveyed.
Despite this, 50% of respondents said that the most important factor in the claims process is not speed, but accuracy – suggesting a potential conflict of interests.
“It’s not so easy to solve an insurance claim both quickly and accurately – there are a lot of things you need to take into account,” Amir explained, adding that artificial intelligence (AI) may offer a solution.
When asking the question “How can we make the insurance claims process better?” Amir said that it was of fundamental importance to understand what AI does.
“AI is about prediction,” he said, noting that this is why AI is “trained”. The AI model is given data, informed what the right answers are, and then responds to further inputs more accurately based on this previous data.
“Every new claim that comes in provides additional context for AI models to extract additional information,” he explained.
“When taken to the insurance world, what we do as a company is take a lot of data from insurance claims, and we train our models to identify things relating to these claims,” allowing us to identify things like liability, coverage, the reserve, and the settlement amount.
Amir added that AI can be used to extract all the relevant data from documents, check what is covered by the policy, and assist in making a final decision. It can also be used to identify potential fraud.
“If there is any missing information, the AI can flag it, or if there is a lot of complex information, the AI can summarise it,” he noted.
When considering whether to go with a customised AI model, or one from a third party, Amir said there were a number of factors to consider. This includes what features you want, and whether an existing product can already deliver these things; how long you have to develop your own solution; how much control you have over the product’s development; and what the initial costs are, versus the long-term cost of upkeep.
Sarah Page, Marketing Lead for Insurance, Holiday Extras
Page also talked about the potential for AI to transform how insurance is provided.
She explained that while views on AI in society as a whole remain divided between those who are overly enthusiastic, and those who are overly pessimistic, “the reality is somewhere in the middle”.
She argued that “the real opportunity … is clarity” and that AI’s potential in the industry lies in its ability to address “one of the most well-known and significant problems – that people do not understand their cover, [because] insurance documents are pretty boring”.
Page cited a survey that found that 55% of travellers “did not read their terms and conditions” – and that of the remaining 45% who said they did, almost three-quarters (74%) mistakenly claimed they were covered for “everything”.
This false confidence, she said, can have a severe negative impact when the policyholder needs to make a claim.
Page highlighted Holiday Extras’ new AI-powered assistant, SYD, which is designed to answer customers’ questions about their coverage, such as what they are or aren’t covered for.
She noted that in order to develop the tool, Holiday Extras had to ensure that they took an appropriate level of care to see that it was trained carefully, and with an appropriate number of “guard rails”. This included the careful feeding of in-house documentation, as well as shutting SYD off from the wider internet to avoid outside interference that might generate inaccurate answers.
Page explained that the process had been a success: following the implementation of SYD, there was a “reduction in policy cover and contact queries, a 40% reduction in policy cover complaints, a 108% reduction in average call duration, and a faster product and UX cycle,” she said.
Referring to Amir’s comments about the “build versus buy” debate surrounding where to source AI solutions, Page said that ultimately Holiday Extras had decided to create their solution in-house. This was “because it aligned with our core business strategy, allowed for faster iteration, was totally customisable, and gave us full control of the data… letting us continue to innovate”.
Ernesto Suarez, Chief Executive, Gigasure
In his talk, Suarez focused on how developing a clear-sighted digital vision was at the heart of his company during its creation.
He explained that at the start, there was also a very strong focus on being “more interactive” and “customisable”, with an ability to “toggle on and off some features”.
This, Suarez said, was essential to targeting Gigasure’s core demographics of millennial and Generation Z customers, due to their “prioritisation of experiences” such as extreme sports and adventure during their travels, as well as expecting “convenience”, and “digital convenience, from booking to post-trip”.
Additionally, he noted that these demographics “rely heavily on online research and social validation” when choosing which products to purchase.
“The proposition we set up is really designed for all these factors and features in their products,” he added. “We had to come up with ways to make the product relevant and accessible.”
To achieve this, Gigasure focused on a number of elements, including a high level of customisation, a strong social media presence, and a high degree of accessibility via online channels.
“Social media is key: one of the first things we try to do with social media is be present – educate, inspire, inform, guide, and build our community,” he explained.
Suarez also highlighted the company’s use of parametric insurance, offered in partnership with Blink Parametric – which provides automatic payouts to travellers in the event of flight or baggage delays – as another example of meeting the millennial desire for convenience.