Aurora - transparent co-insurance for SMEs

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This project will develop a ground-breaking approach to insurance, delivering a digital platform that brings tailored, modular co-insurance to businesses. Customers can get quotes in real-time from multiple providers, bundled into one price, with full transparency over their cover. The platform will also define insurance contracts in a machine-readable form, resulting in much greater clarity on the covered events / limits and allowing both customers and claims handlers to understand and interrogate the cover on offer.This will allow for better understanding and pricing of risk and help to avoid instances such as the recent problems seen with Covid business interruption insurance that led to court cases being necessary to establish if this risk was actually covered.The innovation will benefit customers, reducing the ~£216.2mil SMEs spend each year on insurance they don't need (Suited.Insure) and enabling greater confidence in their insurance cover, allowing for increased risk-taking and greater growth as a result. It will also benefit claims handlers, with liability determined faster, leading to prompt claims settlement and saving administration time.Our innovation will use a Prolog database with new policy-wording segments and rules for usage that will define insurance contracts. This approach delivers clarity of wording and the flexibility to ensure the right cover is in place, avoiding the underinsurance currently estimated to affect ~80% of businesses (Sedgwick).This sets us markedly apart from existing state-of-the-art. While there are some online brokerages in the UK, all are reliant on existing PDF policy wordings -- the majority of which are based on legacy systems that have been transformed incrementally, in some cases over decades, leading to confusing or conflicting wording and an unintentional lack of transparency. This in turn drives confusion over coverage and an inability to tailor policies to the specific need. Current providers can only quote the most straightforward cases in real-time, with delays occurring for all other cases.Our co-insurance platform will transform the market, helping to restore consumer confidence in insurance, empowering SMEs with individualised insurance cover, and bringing a UK-based digital company to compete with international incumbents.