Regtech start-up Haast was crowned the winner at this year’s insurtechLIVE pitch event, in which five companies vied for honours.

Haast, which uses advanced technology to help organisations manage, monitor and reduce compliance and regulatory risk, will join an Insurtech Australia delegation to Europe next month and receive a customised mentoring program.

Co-founder Kunal Vankadara tells insuranceNEWS.com.au the win is “an awesome opportunity to just connect with so many fantastic insurers and a great way for us to really test our value proposition. It's always hard when you’re a start-up to engage in the right ways, which is why Insurtech Australia is awesome, because it gets you in front, and it gets your name known.

“You can really get that key value proposition quite efficiently, concisely and make sure everyone really understands what you do, because often it takes time to demo your product or get a phone call.”

The Haast platform aggregates and indexes an organisation’s digital presence, so all web pages, documents, images, videos and HTML tags are continually monitored, and any issues are flagged as they come up.  

“The biggest benefit is generating a single platform where all your teams have a single source of truth, so your marketing team to compliance. You’re able to instantly, very clearly see what’s live and what needs to change,” Mr Vankadara said.

Haast describes itself as an “AI-powered marketing compliance firewall”.

Mr Vankadara, who previously worked in law and consulting, says he spent a lot of time reviewing marketing material and “doing it one by one”. He had a penny-drop moment that “this should be automated. It’s really simple, easy stuff.”  

“It’s the stuff that [artificial intelligence] is good at and that humans are not good at,” he said. “It’s a really good entryway into using more AI and really making that efficiency benefit. It's traceable, it's more readable, and you have that level of compliance.”

Haast says an explosion of digital content has made marketing compliance “virtually impossible”, as digital brands have on average 20 channels marketing products.  

“Staying on top of digital assets from a compliance perspective is absolutely a nightmare. You’ve got thousands of different insurance policies, offer documents, conditions, benefits and whatnot to manage.

“This makes marketing compliance incredibly hard. The process right now is incredibly manual, slow and not necessarily sensitive. So Haast automated marketing compliance with AI across all stages of the asset life cycle.”