Meet the insurtech: Deep Vector

Insurance brokers and agents looking to reduce the risk in the policies and clients they cover can look to loss runs, which are business claims histories showing just how risky a prospective client has or has not been.

Loss runs, however, have been a resource-intensive process. Scott Knowles and Wesley Janse van Rensburg, co-founders of Deep Vector, went live with their Loss Scan AI-based product in August 2023. This year, the company participated in InsurTech NY’s Match accelerator program. Loss Scan tackles the problem of extracting data from loss runs in a manner that helps the insurer and agents better understand the market of the insured, and its risks, Knowles explained.

“The most difficult thing for anybody to do, is not only get all these loss runs right, and figure out, once we have them, how do we evaluate them?” he said. “It’s a human process normally in the background. That’s the way it’s always been done, page by page by page of claims information. Then try to log a conceptual idea of how many types of claims are we having in this particular industry, so that they can actually make a decision on what to do for rates, by industry, whether it be workers compensation, auto liability, you name it.”

Knowles, who began his career as a commercial insurance agent, started working in insurtech and operations in 2009, in roles with CWI Insurance, Ally, MODGIC and Zywave, before starting Loss Scan in January 2023. Knowles and van Rensburg, CTO of Deep Vector, had worked together at Zywave, particularly on its ModMaster workers comp analysis service. Zywave had acquired MODGIC, where Knowles was CEO for 10 years.

Loss Scan creates a true full picture of risk by taking all the granular pieces of claims information, such as claim status, cause of a claim, location or vehicle information if applicable. These can amount to hundreds or thousands of pages with all of the claim’s details. Loss Scan then “re-presents” the information, so carriers can better evaluate the risk of an insured, Knowles said. 

Agents and brokers pursuing customers can then present them with the results of a Loss Scan evaluation to show what their risks are. “My job as an agent is to evaluate your business, find the holes that are causing you pain points with your premiums, create a creative but very impactful plan that will help us mitigate and reduce these claims,” Knowles said.

The company is working on a risk scoring system to add to Loss Scan, to make it easier to understand the results it produces, according to Knowles, and expects to roll out that feature in the first or second quarter of 2025.