InsTech - insurance & innovation with Matthew Grant & Robin Merttens

Haris Khan & Arved Pohlabeln: Novee: Redesigning underwriting for the specialty market (381)

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In this episode, Robin Merttens sits down with Haris Khan and Arved Pohlabeln, co-founders of Novee, to unpack what’s broken in specialty underwriting — and how AI is finally in a position to fix it.

Having met as consultants at Deloitte, Haris and Arved kept encountering the same themes: overworked underwriters, inconsistent submissions, and transformation efforts that rarely made a real difference. That frustration turned into action. Today, they’re building Novee — an AI assistant designed specifically for underwriters, combining insight generation with targeted automation.

In this conversation, Haris and Arved share:

  • Why underwriting processes remain complex, fragmented and hard to standardise
  • What makes specialty submissions so variable — and why every case feels like an edge case
  • How Novee delivers value in two ways: by surfacing better risk insights and automating manual tasks
  • Why underwriters are embracing AI tools now — not resisting them
  • What it takes to get live in weeks, not months, with meaningful value
  • The real-world impact of extracting information from unstructured submissions
  • How they raised £1.6 million in seed funding and what they’re doing with it
  • Why verticalised AI is outperforming generic solutions in insurance
  • What it means to redesign underwriting interaction patterns — and why inbox to insight is the future
  • The case for using AI before you fix your data, not after

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    Continuing Professional Development

    This InsTech Podcast Episode is accredited by the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII). By listening, you can claim up to 0.5 hours towards your CPD scheme.

    By the end of this podcast, you should be able to meet the following Learning Objectives:

    • Describe the real-world challenges underwriters face when working with inconsistent, unstructured submissions.
    • Define the concept of verticalised AI in the context of specialty underwriting and how it differs from generic AI solutions.
    • List the specific ways Novee supports underwriters through both insight delivery and task automation.

      • If your organisation is a member of InsTech and you would like to receive a quarterly summary of the CPD hours you have earned, visit the Episode 381 page of the InsTech website or email [email protected] to let us know you have listened to this podcast.

      To help us measure the impact of the learning, we would be grateful if you would take a minute to complete a quick feedback survey.

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