Insurance fraud increasing

She stated that according to research, as much as 75 percent of persons who put in claims at one point in time or the other, have overstated their claims.

“The finger comes back to us, at some point in time we may have over-claimed a few dollars and thought it was not a crime but in fact it is fraud,” she stated.

She added that police officers were not paying much attention to fraudulent insurance crimes so it was up to the industry to raise awareness on the issue. I-Share is an information technology (IT) solution system geared towards reducing the number of fraudulent claims in the motor insurance industry.

Balliram Sawh, general manager (General Insurance Service) of the Maritime Financial Group, said the solution will allow companies to make better decisions about clients by allowing them to check claims information before policies are sold.

In addition, it will reduce loss ratios by identifying clients who switch insurance companies regularly and also reduce the incidence of insurance fraud by building an industry-wide profile on customers, vehicles and their claims history with the insurance companies.

“I-Share will allow authorised insurance company employees to access information on a customer from his office,” Sawh stated. He said the information retrieved will comprise a risk profile of the customers built from information stored in every participating insurance company’s database.

However, he highlighted that the solution will not expose a company’s live production applications or data to other companies and it will include built-in measures to prevent the system from being used to “poach” customers from other insurance companies.

“The information will be stored in an IT and physically safe environment to ensure neither the subscribers nor insured parties are subject to any breach to their right to privacy,” Sawh said.

He admitted that the IT solution will not solve all instances of fraud in the motor insurance industry. “ATTIC believes if every motor insurer is able to detect one fraudulent claim the system will not only pay for itself but with a major fraud element taken out of the system, the insurance industry could then concentrate on adding value to customers.”