QBE’s venture capital arm has chosen machine learning company RiskGenius for its first investment from a $US50 million ($64.85 million) insurtech fund.

RiskGenius’ algorithms break down and decipher the content of insurance policies, helping carriers, brokers and regulators analyse policy and endorsement language and speed up product development.

QBE Ventures has signed a multi-year commercial use agreement for the RiskGenius platform, which has been labelled “the Google of insurance”.

QBE North America completed a proof-of-concept for the platform earlier this year and will be the first division to implement it.

Head of Global Innovation Lab Ted Stuckey told insuranceNEWS.com.au that after testing the product QBE expects to make “hundreds of hours of time savings per employee each year”.

“For some internal employee tasks, such as policy comparisons, we saw time savings of upwards of 65% by using the RiskGenius platform,” he said.

“The machine learning platform, Johannes, that it has build is optimised for working with short clauses of text – thus it is incredibly powerful when working with insurance language policy.”

QBE expects to upload more than 125,000 policy documents into RiskGenius next year.

Mr Stuckey says the platform will solve a “real pain point” within QBE and partners, and customers will soon benefit.

“It can quickly compare policies or clauses, whether those of the company, a competitor, a producer or bespoke wording,” he says.

“It yields rich analytics on policy documents, for example, scoring policy wording. With RiskGenius, QBE will be able to quickly and easily select and incorporate clauses into a policy builder, drawing upon its entire database with one click.”