2020 Wrap-Up!

Each December since founding omni:us, I’ve sat down to write an annual wrap-up blog. Usually, I began with something like ‘Phew, what a year, so much has happened, full of opportunity and progress...’ 

This year outdid them all.

Every start up wants to be an outcome first, as opposed to a face time first company. 

Before Covid-19, physical presence in the office and “face time” was still highly appreciated at omni:us. Why? Because we were used to working this way? Or because we really needed to socialize in person, in order to nourish our culture, to solve conflicts? 

In our case it was challenging because we didn’t define how we work remotely and what exactly we expected from people who sometimes worked from home. Is it OK for my team to do home office? How often? Is it the manager who decides for his/her team? etc etc.

Or is it based only on trust? Can we really trust our people to decide what’s best for the company? These questions was forced upon us with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. 

The response was incredible. 

In our case, at omni:us, efficiency actually increased. In terms of outcome, this year was a success for us. We’re currently working on our concept of how to continue in a post-Covid world. And I’m already super excited about the approach we’re coming up with as a team.

Besides this big change, the biggest topic for omni:us in 2020 was without a doubt our product development – which has advanced to a point where the omni:us Platform is efficiently automating claims! 

Due to travel restrictions some of our more effort-intense customer engagements were postponed until 2021, which freed up resources and resulted in our achieving more in product development than was originally planned. We increased the development speed to the point that we currently have daily demos which, as a progress addict, I really LOVE. We can’t wait to automate more visionary insurers next year! 

Talking about visionaries in our field; I also want to say a big thank you to Ariel Gorelik, Executive VP, CIO and COO of AmTrust Financial Services. It’s impressive how open AmTrust is when it comes to really bringing AI into production. Running a proof-of concept is easy. But fully implementing AI is a journey, that takes courage, patience and persistence. I’m acutely aware of all the different challenges an insurer is confronted with when it comes to claims automation. It’s a massive project. And the longer we are in this space, the more I admire all the pioneers of the insurance market. But it pays off. For AmTrust we are achieving ~80% automation and processing 27 million pages annually, more to come ??!

All in all, this year was really a major success for us and I am very much looking forward to starting 2021. After this year, I feel that there is absolutely nothing that we can’t deal with, as a team, as omni:us.