The Canadian National Insurance Crime Services can count one more insurer among its ranks, as it prepares to launch in 2015 to tackle an estimated $1.6 billion in insurance fraud.
“We are pleased Wawanesa has joined CANATICS and our fight to combat insurance crime,” says Ben Kosic, president and CEO of CANATICS. “Our membership now includes 10 insurers representing 75 per cent of the direct written premium market for auto insurance in Ontario.”
Automobile insurance fraud is a significant cost to consumers across Canada, and particularly in Ontario.
A report by KPMG Canada, prepared for the Ontario Auto Insurance Anti-Fraud Task Force, estimated that, in Ontario, as much as $1.6 billion per year is paid by insurance companies in response to fraudulent or inflated auto insurance claims.
The Task Force has recommended that “insurers should move aggressively to establish an organization that would pool and analyse claims data in order to identify potential cases of organized or premeditated fraud.”
In addition to Wawanesa supplying data to CANATICS, Barbara MacIntyre, Vice President of Claims for the company, will be joining the CANATICS Board.
CANATICS is a not-for-profit organization focused on identifying potentially suspicious claims in insurance industry pooled data, to facilitate further investigation by individual insurers.
CANATICS is expected to begin operations in 2015.
Earlier this year it announced a five-year deal with BAE Systems Applied Intelligence (formerly Detica) to detect suspicious auto insurance claims in Canada. BAE Systems Applied Intelligence is a global organization, headquartered in the U.K. with offices in Canada, whose anti-crime solutions are currently being used by over 130 clients, spanning four continents, including six of the top 10 financial banking and insurance institutions in the world
