The first time I met Gino Bustamante, CEO and Founder of LISA Insurtech was in 2019, when everything was just a project. Today LISA Insurtech has become the leading insurtech in the application of artificial intelligence for claims handling. It is not a surprise that we find, once again, HCS Capital (Jooycar, DeNexus, Scadafence, Ceptinel…) as VC to empower this insurtech in Latam, in US and maybe in the future in Europe.
Today I’m meeting again with Gino, a friend of the house and one of the founders of InsurteChile, to talk about what should we expect from LISA Insurtech.
To begin with, I asked Gino to tell us a little about LISA Insurtech, mostly for those who don’t know it yet. Gino tells me: “the name?“, I’ll tell you at the end but it’s only for your audience. Gino starts with Einstein’s famous phrase: “we cannot expect different results if we keep doing things the same way we always have” and he says: “LISA is that. Is supporting insurance carriers to rethink their processes, especially claims, and automate them through advanced technological solutions and artificial intelligence”.
LISA has a very important purpose: “To simplify people’s lives at the time of loss“: to be able to make it possible for all those people who are going through a difficult time, whether because they have had an accident, lost their home, are going through a health difficulty or the loss of a loved one, to access the help and support they need in the easiest and simplest way possible. And this purpose is built together with insurers. Don’t forget that, at the end of the day, what they are doing is improving processes through and thanks to artificial intelligence.
They started in 2019 as three people working in a WeWork, with one client in Chile. Today, two years later, they are more than 40 people managing operations in 16 different parts of the world. “These are exciting times for LISA“, that’s fantastic!
Regarding the pandemic, he tells me that he believes that, due to its particularities, few companies were as prepared as they were to face the challenges it brought. From their origins, they were formed from remote work and with teams in different parts of the world, and they are 100% familiar with all the tools that technology makes available to us to facilitate this way of relating and the processes and indicators that allow us to work with high-performance teams remotely.
I think everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence these days, right? That’s why I’m interested to know what distinguishes the AI from LISA. Gino tells me that there are mainly two things. First, it is in house: all the developments have been done by them, which gives them a different ownership of what they are doing than what the market can offer. Second, their flexibility: their solutions adapt and grow with their clients. The most important thing, in his opinion, is to understand that technology today is a commodity. What sets them apart is the knowledge behind that technology and how that allows them to drive a new way of thinking about processes. “That’s where the real change lies and certainly a very powerful and long-necked competitive advantage.”
They are working with the Embedded Insurance model with LISA Gateway, the most dynamic, versatile and nocode solution to face the new generation of policyholder and industry requirements. It arises from having seen an opportunity in what their customers were telling them about the fact that the current offer does not satisfy them in the pains they are currently having. So they are preparing a more specific suite to the pains that the industry has and they are creating the new generation of automated underwriting, renewal, quoting, issuance and even fraud control.
They do not lose focus on adding value to the current problems of the industry, therefore, their major investment is in R&D. Talking about IOT in insurance today is a concrete and very advanced topic. At LISA they have launched their applied solution to perform deep and agnostic integration between startups specialized in telemetry and providers of telemetric information sources (such as smartwatches or sensors). In short and simple, with LISA TMT companies will be prepared to face new challenges and products using IOT, such as embedded insurance, usage-based insurance (auto and home), parametric insurance and life and health insurance. They will be put on steroids to accelerate their adoption curve of new business models and time to market.
As a global company, it is important for them to be in all markets. Consolidate in Latin America and open up the United States and Europe. To accelerate their expansion, they benefit from the support of HCS Capital as VC. Their solution generates value in all insurance companies, no matter where they are located. Gino believes that in the US there is more progress than in Latin America with respect to process automation. However, he says that there are shared pain points, which ultimately have to do with the lack of control over the process that claims managers have and that is precisely what LISA seeks to address.
They were winners of the Zurich Innovation Championship, the great global competition, among other awards they have won. For them these awards are a sign that they are doing things well and internally it is super powerful because it gives them confidence that what they are doing is important and has sustainability. The fact that a company of Zurich’s size is betting on them is a tremendous endorsement, acknowledges Gino. They have tremendous expectations for the process to come: they want to absorb as much as they can. They believe there are no limits to where they can go. “We are very excited”.
At the end of our meeting, he tells me: “so you want to know why we are called LISA?” Waiting with curiosity for his answer, he tells me that they were starting the company “from scratch” and an opportunity came up: they were invited to raise state funds and had to prepare their pitch. They were in the ideation and construction phase and, therefore, without a name yet. To participate, they had to present the project in less than 24 hours, and that was when, with their pragmatic minds, they thought: “We settle claims in an automated way with Artificial Intelligence” and that is how the acronym LISA was born, in spanish that means: LIquidación de Siniestros Automatizados con inteligencia artificial (Liquidation of Automated Claims with Artificial Intelligence). “There is no better name than LISA,” he says proudly.
LISA Insurtech to contact quickly and follow closely…
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