The difficulty many consumers have understanding complex and often unclear insurance policy and PDS forms is well documented and, according to industry stakeholders, can be a major cause of unintentional underinsurance. However, this is also a challenge for insurance professionals, including brokers, who are trying to help their customers understand coverage limits or deal with a claims process.
The Insurance Business Awards 2025 on May 2 will celebrate top achievers from insurers, brokerages, underwriting agencies and service firms. One thing all of the awards recipients will have in common is the many hours they have spent pouring over insurance policy documents to comprehend coverage details.
“You’ve got the sheer complexity of the language, for starters,” said Jasmin Flori-Hess (pictured). Flori-Hess is CEO of Raindrop, a Darwin-based insurtech company and a sponsor of the awards.
Further pain for insurance professionals, suggested Hess, comes from the sheer time they spend reading these documents and the need for accuracy.
“Keeping everything accurate is a proper challenge,” she said.
For brokers, another challenge can be the lack of independent tools to help check insurance documentation.
“Many existing solutions are tied to existing insurance interests,” said Flori-Hess.
For all these reasons, training new staff and explaining the meaning of policy wordings can be very difficult.
Flori-Hess runs a firm that specialises in using artificial intelligence (AI) to help insurance professionals analyse and understand insurance documents. She said when she started her company, one thing stood out as urgently needing improvement.
“The jargon, absolutely! It was like wading through treacle,” she said. “You could see why insurance professionals were spending hours just trying to decipher it all.”
The CEO said anecdotal evidence suggests that brokers are spending three hours each day pouring over their customers’ overly complex insurance documents.
It was Flori-Hess’s own, even more time-consuming experience with “jargon” filled insurance policies that became a major motivation for starting her business.
“Back in 2021, I was organising a five-month family sabbatical,” she said. “It was a proper camping adventure in the Australian bush and I thought one night: ‘What happens if a snake bites us on a hike, a croc takes more than just the fishing rod, or we snorkel too close to a shark?’”
This thought prompted her to sort out insurance coverage. She found “wrestling” with the policy documents from different insurers a “nightmare.”
“15 hours later, just to understand eight policies!” said Flori-Hess. “With my background in financial services, I thought, there's got to be a better way that one understands such a critical document!"
She started by approaching her friends, who were brokers, for help.
“No-one found the holy grail of insurance document understanding,” said Flori-Hess. “That's how Raindrop came about – a bit like how a single drop of water can reflect the whole landscape, we're distilling all that complex jargon into something crystal clear.”
Insurance Business asked her to explain how this clarity, ideally, would work in practice? She said her firm’s AI replaces the need for a broker to dig through “piles of paperwork” or search through numerous digital documents.
“Our AI, which is validated by human experts, gives them instant, jargon-free summaries, policy comparisons, and highlights any potential gaps or exclusions,” said Flori-Hess. “They can make quick, accurate decisions, saving loads of time and keeping their clients happy.”
She estimated a time saving of at least 50% in an average broker’s daily reading time, or about 30 hours per month.
“That is almost one quarter of their work time,” said Flori-Hess. “It's about turning that mountain of information into something they can use straight away.”
This year’s Insurance Business Awards – a black-tie gala dinner with music and entertainment – is at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney. There are 21 awards categories celebrating the work of claims teams, brokers, underwriters, insurers, BDMs, authorised representatives (ARs) and insurtechs.
There are also accolades for young achievers, lifetime achievers, women of distinction, top CEOs and for excellence in diversity, equity and inclusion.
