AskLudo trials deliver almost £2m in savings to UK insurers

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Validus has launched its fraud detection software AskLudo after a successful two-year trial with some of the UK’s top insurers.

The Norwich-based insurance services business said the service, which is part of its claims investigation unit (CIU), had successfully identified almost £2m of credit hire savings from nearly 250 separate cases and 21 insurer clients, including eight of the UK’s top 10 insurers.

Validus CIU head Mark Murphy said: “We’re rolling out the product after extensive testing and expect to make a major contribution to fraud reduction in the motor claims market. This technology is incredibly user-friendly and has the capacity to become a standard fraud prevention tool for those organisations that receive credit hire claims.”

The software works by cross-checking every 24 hours the claims data submitted by the insurer against all claims in the database to identify overlapping hires (where the same vehicle appears on different claims at the same time), phantom hires, and exaggerated or inflated hire, recovery or storage claims. Currently there are more than 220,000 claims on the database but this number is increasing on a daily basis as more subscribers participate.

When a match is spotted, the insurer receives an alert, and can either commission Validus’s CIU to investigate the case, or purchase the details and carry out their own inquiries.

Murphy added: “The combination of our own data, investigation of the claims and intelligence from other sources has thrown up hundreds of claims worthy of investigation with some significant savings for our clients.”

The team has also developed strong links with a variety of other data providers and intelligence sources, including a large number of local authority taxi licensing departments.