In 2017, Avinash Misra departed Endeavor Software Technologies, a company he had founded and led since 2005, and sold in 2015. Endeavor did digital interventions to improve customer-facing experiences.
He began thinking about how to truly understand the nature of work, especially in large organizations, and found that the insurance industry was the ideal sector to look at to address problems with efficiency and productivity in the work.
Founding and launching Skan in 2019 (as CEO), with backers including Dell Technologies Capital, Bloomberg Beta and Citi Ventures, Misra identified an opacity of the insurance industry's processes similar to what he'd seen in other industries.
"Whether you're adjudicating a claim, onboarding a credit card customer or doing a mortgage or loan, we built systems upon systems, and people upon people, to do various parts of those business processes," he said. "So today, when organizations look to digitally transform a given business process, the first recourse is to discover the way people are working. When you ask what is happening in a business, the answer is not what they're doing. The answer is usually what they're supposed to be doing."
This leaves a gap between goals and reality, according to Misra. "We have AI observing all the actions the operators of business processes are doing, which applications someone invoked and other applications that someone invoked for the same stage of the process," he said. "Then we create the deepest map of how that business process truly runs."
Skan's AI finds the most expensive steps in business processes, where the bottlenecks are and whether the bottlenecks are caused by operations issues, tools issues or processor issues, Misra said. "In underwriting, in claims administration, everywhere you have large teams and large systems, and there is opacity in work, we are valuable," he said.
However, while efficiency is one of the benefits Skan provides, improving effectiveness is its deeper goal, Misra explained. "Efficiency is a byproduct of something even more fundamental, which is effectiveness," he said. "You might have done a lot of work on a business process like claims and done it in a very efficient way. But the end outcome is that moving a customer satisfaction score or other KPIs in the right direction may still not be happening. Ultimately, against the KPIs, like cost and customer satisfaction, we disaggregate those into the actions driving those outcomes. Efficiency pales in comparison to effectiveness, because then you observe work getting done and the implications of that work at scale to the core drivers you want to influence."
Aside from cost and customer satisfaction, Misra also identified regulatory compliance as another KPI where being more effective can improve the way an insurer functions.
Skan's value proposition is catching on, with 40 companies among the Fortune 200 now signed on as users, according to Misra. The client companies are in North America, but Skan's operation is global because these companies' operations extend to the Philippines, India, the Middle East and Europe.
