The sooner it ends, the better. This is the Brazilian way of thinking about the bureaucracy. To reduce the time required for vehicle inspections, Pier Segradora uses artificial intelligence agents that perform tasks digitally and almost instantly. “No one but the insured participates in this step,” said Kamila Katagiri, co-CEO of InsurTech Peer.
This dynamic process currently occurs in 20% of cases, and the company expects it to reach 30% by December. “There is no doubt that this level will reach 80% very soon,” Kataguiri said. “You open the app, click get a quote, take the inspection, go to a location where the customer takes eight photos of the car, and run the AI. And if the case is approved, you are directed to payment, where the insured simply enters their card details and the insurance is issued.” If there is no immediate approval, the AI transfers the case to another analytics instance. This can take up to 24 hours.
Pier, which expects revenues of around 250 million reais in 2025, up 60% year-on-year, was born in 2018 and was a pioneer in the “insurtech” market. He needed to knock on the door of the Office of Private Insurance Supervision (SUSEP), the federal agency responsible for insurance administration and supervision, public private pensions, capitalization, and reinsurance markets, to talk about its operations. “There were no such types of insurance companies, technology or venture capital investing in this space in this country. There were regulatory changes that we initiated to allow the presence of startups and innovation within the insurance market,” says the executive.
Pier Scan, the name of Pier’s application, is immediacy, so it actually takes time for the insured to register and take a photo. All instructions showing the exact angle are always displayed within the system to prevent fraud. This means you can’t take a photo with your phone and manipulate it with an external program and send it back to the app, nor can you take a “picture of a photo” of a car that isn’t yours, for example because the AI detects it.
Pier currently has 60,000 auto insurance customers and 100,000 mobile phone insurance customers, which is where the initiative began. “This was a product that was under-appreciated in the market. It didn’t cover so-called simple cell phone theft. In other words, the most common case is someone takes it and you don’t even know who it is. Most insurance companies didn’t cover this,” he says.
“We started with mobile phones because there wasn’t much competition in the market then. Unlike cars, it was a product with low value and big risks. Everyone said we would go bankrupt. And with break-even and cash generation, we are here today,” he added.
But how can you use fake theft notifications to prevent cell phone theft scams? “We have to believe that the majority of the population is made up of good citizens. Fraudsters are a minority. But to catch fraudsters, we need to make good use of data from predictive models,” Katagiri says. Upon approval, Pier installs the insurance application on the customer’s geolocation monitored device. Approximately 70% of Pier’s cell phone base is iPhones, but we can insure any brand.
“Currently, our accident rate is 30%. If you lose your phone or buy it second-hand, we have no waiting period, no length of use, and we accept items that most people don’t accept. And as soon as we have the latest data on your stolen phone, we pay your account. Nowadays, no one goes more than a day without their device. In fact, they go more than an hour without their phone,” says Katagiri. The average mobile phone insurance ticket costs R60 per month. Since its founding, the company has already claimed more than 200 million reais in damages.
About The Author
