Avantia, the digital home insurance platform and the parent company behind award-winning direct-to-consumer home insurance brand Homeprotect is rewriting the rules of claims management, with the announcement of an industry-first AI tool named ‘Holmes’, designed to tackle fraud and transform home insurance claims.
Fraudulent claims continue to severely impact the insurance sector in the UK. According to the Association of British Insurers, fraudulent property insurance claims cost the industry more than £143 million each year. Current detection methods have limitations, resulting in slower outcomes for genuine customers, higher operational costs, and undetected fraud causing premium inflation for policyholders.
To address this, ECI has supported Avantia to develop a cutting-edge solution designed to disrupt the traditional approach to claims. Built on its existing proprietary decisioning platform, Holmes is trained to use a vast amount of data gathered internally through the customer lifecycle and supports handlers by rapidly identifying potential fraudulent activity, as well as flagging straightforward cases for quick and fair resolution.
In initial trials which have taken place in Q2 2025, Holmes exceeded expectations – improving fraud detection accuracy and highlighting cases ready for quick settlement. Avantia also found that its new AI tool proved to have much broader benefits than its original use case, making recommendations about claim coverage, payment amounts, data capture and next steps, particularly on highly complex claims. As a result, Avantia has identified significant operational and indemnity cost savings from rolling Holmes out to all claims, which will enable the business to scale faster and invest the savings in enhancing their product to the benefit of all customers. In controlled tests, Holmes not only helped make Avantia’s fraud detection rate 6x more effective, it was also able to complete payment calculations with a 98% accuracy and make additional recommendations in 50% of cases which meaningfully improved the outcome of a claim for Homeprotect and customers.
