In this second part of our interview with Erick Sloeth, we discuss how Erick supports insurers in picking up fraud cases, and what insurers can do to strengthen fraud resilience.

Tim: What advice do you have for claims functions to detect fraud? What indicators or data points could they be looking at?

Erick: You can create several different criteria. Checking demographic factors and things of that nature can help to provide potential kickouts to investigate further. Then there is the medical perspective, understanding questions like the probability of individuals experiencing a certain type of medical event.

Even once you have all of this built out, it's important to realise that you can't be an expert at everything. So having experts to contact for a specific issue and then leveraging those contacts will help you see a fuller, bigger picture. It's often about just coming up with more of a holistic approach.

Tim: Are there indicators around the time it takes for the policy to be taken out to the point of claim?

Erick: With a life policy, the early years are going to be crucial – you can catch a lot of fraudulent claims at that time. Policy length and policy amounts are important. The savvier fraudsters will sometimes try and let things cook for a while before fully trying to harvest the fraud there.

Tim: How about looking at in-force business? Do you see the possibility of creating a virtuous cycle between claims and portfolio revisions?

Erick: Fraudsters can easily leave behind things that they should have sewed up a bit better. You can link something that happened fraudulently on the claim side with other elements that are still on your books. Many companies do a great job of this.

Tim: How important is knowledge exchange within the industry?

Erick: I think you really start to have a lot of success when companies talk to one another. Networking allows us to exchange information. It can be as simple as finding out if another company is seeing the same patterns. Reinsurers play a crucial role in seeing if an issue is resonating with clients. The sharing of knowledge takes us a lot further than just us sitting in our own little compartments and trying to solve it all on our own.