Australia is “leading the way in a number of areas” when it comes to improving conversations with customers in heavily regulated industries such as insurance, the CEO of Smart Communications says. 

Leigh Segall, visiting Australia from the US last week, told insuranceNEWS.com.au about 100 Smart employees – one-fifth of the group’s staff – are in Australia, across Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra.

“We’re very much a global company, but half of our capabilities inside the conversation cloud platform were built in Australia,” she said. “The innovation that starts here is powering the work we’re doing globally, that’s the truth ... Australia is doing really great work innovating in technology, and especially in the regulated sectors.”

The Smart Communications platform promises “hyperpersonalised, consistent and compliant communications” at scale and speed. 

It has 700 enterprise customers worldwide, including major insurers, banks and public sector departments – for example, facilitating passport updates or licence changes.

In 2019, it bought Canberra software group Intelledox and rebranded it as SmartIQ, which automates paper forms and manual data entry processes into digital conversations.

Last August, it bought Sydney’s Pendula, which counted Shippit, University of London and Origin Energy as customers.

Late last year, Smart Communications was bought by private equity firm Cinven.  

“Insurance is one of our largest industries. We focus only on the most heavily regulated because we know how difficult it is to get it right,” Ms Segall said.

“There’s so much complexity that’s associated with making sure those critical moments bring together the right combination of empathy, of compliance and meeting regulatory requirements, and making sure the right information is being delivered.

“We built it with an understanding that consumers have the same expectations for an insurer or a bank that they do for a retail experience or something that’s much easier to deliver against – but as an insurer it’s really, really hard to get this right.”

Ms Segall says achieving empathy, meeting regulatory standards and working with fragmented technology are hurdles faced by insurers that Smart Communications is designed to overcome.  

“If we can be that secret sauce behind the major insurers that are thinking about not just how they make their own operations more efficient – which we absolutely do – but how they can do that and really shift the way they engage with their consumers when it matters, that’s a whole lot of fun,” she said.