How Marble expedited user onboarding with automated dec page extraction

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The Challenge

Unlike what’s happened in other financial products like credit, loans, and equities, “there's no single access layer for a consumer to interact with all their insurance products in one place. Insurance is the last personal household financial instrument that's still super balkanized between individual vendors,” says Stuart Winchester, Marble’s founder and CEO. Marble is building that single access layer and combining it with an insurance rewards program.

When a member signs up for the Marble insurance wallet, they first need to port all of their insurance information — like their car insurance, pet insurance, and home insurance — into the platform.

At first blush, integrating directly with the APIs of carriers might be a potential solution to gather a member’s insurance information. However, while some insurance carriers have done a good job of modernizing, as a whole, individuals’ insurance data has not been nearly as universally accessible or portable as other household financial instruments.

Given this friction, Marble instead onboards a member's insurance information by collecting policy declarations pages (or dec page, for short). A dec page contains all of the pertinent information about a particular line of coverage: your address, the cost of coverage, when the policy renews. It also can have information about the insured asset, like a home's age and roof type, or a car's VIN.

Before Sensible, every time a dec page was uploaded, the information was manually keyed into their system by the Marble ops team. This was not only a slow process, but a process that required their ops team to grow directly with the number of members signing up. Marble was looking for a solution that didn’t require them to massively scale the operations team and didn’t disrupt their current workflow.

Sensible was appealing because my team can configure it as needed. We don't need to wait on anyone else. I don't need to pay someone to make changes. We can scale as fast as we can put resources on it and that's the ideal way for us to operate. We don't want to build it ourselves, but we also want to feel like we have control.

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The Solution

As a small growing company, Marble prioritized finding a solution that was both easy to integrate into their current workflow and something that they had control over. Stuart says, “Sensible was appealing because it's something that my team can just configure as needed. We don't need to wait on anyone else. I don't need to pay [someone] to make changes. We can scale as fast as we can put resources on it, and that's the ideal way for us to operate. We don't want to build it ourselves, but we also want to feel like we have control.”

Sensible worked with Marble to support the carriers whose declaration pages were most commonly uploaded into the platform. When a customer uploaded a dec page, the document gets passed to Sensible. Sensible automatically classifies what carrier the document is from and applies the appropriate parsing logic to extract the specific fields that Marble has defined. Once the data is extracted from the PDF, Marble can display that in their web and mobile app, and use the data to do interesting and useful things for their members, like normalizing quotes for creating personalized dashboards

We've been able to go to 2,000 members and ~$2MM of tracked premiums in a very short time with one person on operations. We couldn't have done that without Sensible.

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The Results

As a software company, one of the most valuable resources that you have is your engineering team. “Without Sensible,” Stuart muses, “we probably would've spun up a near-shore/ offshore team to process these by hand…[or] done some doofy OCR thing and tried to train it over time -- it would have just been a huge cost center and time center for us.”

By automating what was previously a manual process, Marble has been able to scale the number of members on their platform without having to hire additional headcount. Since implementing Sensible, Marble has scaled to over 115,000 users, and onboards nearly $6MM of premiums onto their platform monthly with a single ops hire. Before Sensible, 25% of their policies were processed within 1 day; since implementing Sensible, they process 25% of policies in under 10 minutes.