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We’re delighted to announce that Horwich Farrelly’s HOLT product has been shortlisted an incredible five times across two prestigious industry awards.  

The Insurance Times Claims Excellence Awards 2021 are designed to celebrate the companies, teams and individuals who have direct contact with customers in their hour of need, and showcase how this vitally important part of the sector continues to be at the forefront of innovation and outstanding customer service.  

As such, we were over the moon to be recently told that HOLT is a finalist in the categories of Fraud Solution of the Year and Claims Product Solution of the Year – Corporate Advisory.  

If that wasn’t enough, in the last 24 hours we discovered that HOLT has also secured a hat trick of nominations at the Legal Innovation Awards 2021, which similarly seeks to recognise the crucial role lawyers play in promoting innovation working in tandem with colleagues in other disciplines such as IT, business development and finance. 

HOLT is a finalist in the categories of AI Innovation – Internal Excellence, Disruptive Technology of the Year Private Practice and Future of Legal Services Innovation Small-Sized Private Practice

Disrupting the market 

In creating HOLT, our aim was to develop a sector-defining counter-fraud solution so insurers could quickly and automatically assess whether claims should be challenged. We wanted to disrupt the market and put a lawyers ‘brain’ into claims handling departments to improve decision making as early as possible and to ensure only the right claims are defended. 

Developed entirely in-house by our Counter Fraud and IT teams, HOLT is an online platform that helps insurers triage claims for fraud within just 30 seconds. Employing Artificial Intelligence and Optical Character Recognition (where text can be scanned and read in documents) technologies, HOLT has reduced litigation for those clients using the platform by an average of 50%, whilst also increasing fraud detection fivefold.

In the case of one client, HOLT saw the level of fraud being detected increase by 500%. 

Not only has it enabled our clients to enhance their fraud strategies, it has also led to reduced unwanted litigation, resulted in significant operational savings, more informative MI and data-led Know Your Opponent (KYO) strategies. 

HOLT’s successes have led to us winning work from new clients and, where instructions were previously shared with other panel solicitors, to a number of existing clients sending us all their litigation.  

A five-star result for collaboration 

These nominations reflect the considerable amount of work involved by our Counter Fraud and IT teams, and our determination to continuously innovate in order to fight fraud across the insurance industry. 

The winners of the Insurance Times Awards are to be announced at a virtual awards ceremony on Thursday 27 May. The Legal Innovation Awards winners will be revealed just 24 hours later, again at an online event. Our fingers are firmly crossed!