EXPLORE Group expands to offer data analytics services arm targeting SME financial services businesses

EXPLORE Insights is gearing to offer SME  financial services companies in South Africa a crucial data analytics service aimed at delivering real time insights within 24 hours.

“Building an internal analytics capability is expensive and complex.  Our aim is to quickly, seamlessly and affordably provide SMEs with valuable business insights enabling better business decision making and improving market competitiveness. We can provide an analytics platform that can deliver real time insights for the business within 24 hours,” says Dewald Botha, head of EXPLORE Insights.

EXPLORE Insights is a division of The EXPLORE group, which founded the Explore Data Science Academy (EDSA), South Africa’s world-leading data science training institution.

Estimates of the number of companies in South Africa in the “medium size” category (employing between 50 and 200 people) differ but data sourced from SARS estimates that there are about 18 000 of them, which employ more than 1.7 million people.   

“There are thousands of financial services companies in South Africa employing between 30 and 200 people that are well-established and successful.  Financial services is also a sector that can leverage enormous advantage from technology by managing their exposure to risk. Extracting data insights is crucial to this,” Botha says.

In order to deliver its data analytics service EXPLORE Insights leverages the pool of over 80 data scientists within the EXPLORE group - many of whom have been trained by the EXPLORE Data Science Academy and now work on international projects outsourced to the group.

According to Botha, much of the data sources within businesses are isolated and hard to analyze.

EXPLORE Insights has developed a best of breed, modern analytics platform that will allow a business to have a centralised view of their data with instant insights.

“This is our flagship product offering - one that will provide a platform and real-time insights within 24 hours (on key data sources of companies),” Botha says.

EXPLORE Insights provides a range of additional services, which vary according to the needs of the client’s business.  Services range from report creation, skills transfer to the client’s own employees to a permanent ongoing outsourced resource.

“Our aim is to ensure that the client derives ongoing benefit from EXPLORE Insights’ interventions,” Botha says.

Some of the custom solutions developed for companies by the team at EXPLORE Insights include:

Buyer/seller matching- A tool that matches buyers to sellers of motor vehicles based on their likelihood of approval

Street pricing- A tool that scrapes competitor prices for pet insurance to inform price points"

Claims assessor support- A tool that captures pdf invoices digitally and validates it to drastically speed up the claims process

AI Underwriting-  A tool (also API) that predicts default probability based on financials, that outperformed human underwriters

Intelligent OCR-  A tool that digitizes pdf financial and bank statements, storing the data and providing insights

Predictive Reporting - An automated dashboard showing exposure, risk and expected loss metrics by various dimensions

Finally, EXPLORE Insights has its sights set beyond South Africa.  “Other divisions in EDSA have shown that they can compete successfully internationally and we hope to ultimately take EXPLORE Insights services to the rest of Africa and, ultimately, the world,”  Botha concludes. 

For more information on EXPLORE Insights go to https://www.explore-insights.net