Lakshan leads the Product, Engineering, and Delivery teams, as well as Insurance Intelligence, including Bold Penguin’s Data and AI platforms, SubmissionLink® and ClauseLink ™.

Question 1. Can you give us a brief overview of our Insurance Intelligence Platform and how artificial intelligence is changing the workflow in our space?

We have developed a platform that consists of a 12–module toolkit.

This serves all our current use cases. The big focus going forward will be: 

• Market intelligence - The ensemble of models that enables you to route one-to-many submissions to the right carrier. This is particularly important for book rolls.
• Cross sell - this is going beyond the suggestions and completely getting the information to quote and bind.
• Deeper carrier and broker integrations to bind and issue.
• Agentic operations and agentic mapper will be working overtime to figure out how to answer the questions from market intelligence, amplifying the pre-fill examples. Deeper carrier integrations enable the solution to go all the way to bind.

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Question 2. Last year, you took on a new, heightened role as Executive Vice President, Chief Data and Technology Officer, so you have a great bird’s-eye view of where Bold Penguin is today in the commercial insurance market. Can you share with us how and where we are adding value across the ecosystem, including the capabilities that some might not be aware we have?

Last year, we made a fundamental shift as a company toward operating as a digital broker, not simply a brokerage or stand alone tech company. That shift changed how we think about where we add value across the commercial insurance ecosystem, particularly in how we support both growth at the top of the funnel and better yield across the book. We were pretty well served in both these areas, and we “doubled down” on agentic and especially Deep Agents. 

We also brought integrated market intelligence, book roll, and cross-sell capabilities into the flow of work. Market intelligence was an ensemble of different modeling techniques, and we think this goes well beyond the single submission and toward Bold Penguin’s goal of being the premier digital broker for optimizing portfolios.

Deep Agents can reason and partially plan, but optimization requires some of the techniques you would more commonly see behind the scenes at other sophisticated platforms. We are achieving some remarkable success in getting to quoting and binding on some complex business with these agents but I think we are still scratching the surface as we expand the context they operate in along with the data that the Agents have for decisioning.  In the medium term we are looking to see when we can bring in some capabilities on smart contracts as well. I think it is inefficient to transfer data back and forth via APIs and better to transact on the same instance of data via the Blockchain. 

Our focus will remain on the areas that make sense for Bold Penguin and for the partners who rely on us, while staying grounded in real-world impact. We will push the boundaries and invest in areas that make sense for us to become the premier digital broker. 

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Question 3. Bold Penguin operates across the commercial insurance ecosystem, including working with direct-to-consumer, exclusive agents, brokerages, and carriers. So many people see us in different ways and see our value propositions differently. What are some of the common pain points that our technology addresses across audiences?

Top of the funnel and yield are the two things we do at the core. The ratio changes based on the use case and product, but that is it in a nutshell. For carriers, the pain points related to top of the funnel are about growing in targeted segments versus a “spray and pray” approach. This is where market intelligence and cross sell come in. It’s about showing only the combination that has the highest certainty to bind.

We’ve seen the quote performance AHT per single submission drop 60% or more. The fact that we can do thousands per hour means we can mobilize the top of the funnel digitally.

Bonus Question: What is one piece of advice you would give your 20-year-old self?

Move to “startup land” well before you spend years in post-grad studies and corporate life.
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Want to learn more about Lakshan De Silva, artificial intelligence in insurance, and how Bold Penguin drives commercial insurance trends?

Check out other pages and posts:

• Bold Penguin Chief Data Scientist Honored Again For Technology Innovation In 2023 PropertyCasualty360 Insurance Luminaries Award
• Insurance and Technology: 3 Questions with Jay Patel

What you need to know about Lakshan De Silva and artificial intelligence for insurance data analytics at Bold Penguin

Here’s a quick recap of details in this article featuring 3+ questions with Bold Penguin’s Lakshan De Silva:

• Lakshan De Silva’s role: Executive Vice President and Chief Data and Technology Officer
• Insurance Intelligence Platform: A 12-module toolkit integrating key components, including market intelligence, book roll, and cross-sell capabilities into the flow of work.
• Capabilities adding value across the ecosystem: meaningfully improving outcomes with more advanced forms of automation.
• Benefits and evidence: Top-of-the-funnel pain points are about growing in targeted segments to reduce AHT and TAT, advancing more quickly from quote to bind to issue. We’ve been able to reduce AHT per single submission by 60% or more. 

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