The sooner it’s over, the better. This is the Brazilian “mindset” regarding bureaucracy. To reduce the time required to inspect cars, Pier Seguradora uses an artificial intelligence agent that carries out the task digitally and almost instantly. “No human other than the insured is involved at this stage,” says Camilla Kataguiri, co-CEO of insurtech Pier.
This dynamic process currently occurs in 20% of cases and the company expects it to reach 30% by December. “I have no doubt that this level will reach 80% very quickly,” says Katagwiri. “You open the app, you click get a quote, you get a check, you go to the area where the customer takes eight photos of the car, you turn on the AI, and when the status is approved, it directs you to payment, where the insured person enters their card details and that’s it, the policy is issued.” If there is no immediate approval, the case will be passed by the AI to another analysis instance, which takes a maximum of 24 hours.
Pier, which expects revenues of around R$250 million in 2025, a 60% growth compared to the previous year, was founded in 2018 and has been a leader in the “insurtech” market. He had to knock on the door of the Supervisory Authority for Private Insurance (SUSEP), the federal agency responsible for monitoring and supervising insurance, opening private pensions, capitalization and reinsurance market, to talk about its work. “There was no such type of insurance company, technology or venture capital investment in this sector in the country,” says the executive. “There was a change in regulation, which we initiated, to allow the presence of startups and innovation within the insurance market.”
The real-time nature of Pier Scan, which is the name of the Pier app, actually takes away the time it takes for the insured to register and take photos – with all the right angle indicators and always within the system, to prevent fraud. This means: It is not possible to take photos on a cell phone, process them in an external program and insert them back into the app, nor to take a “picture of the photo” of a car that is not yours, for example, as it is detected by artificial intelligence.
Pier currently has 60,000 auto insurance customers and 100,000 cell phone insurance customers, a segment that has begun its journey. “It wasn’t a highly regarded product on the market, and it didn’t cover what’s called simple cell phone theft. In other words, the most common, where someone takes it and the user doesn’t even see who it is. Most insurance companies didn’t cover that,” he says.
He adds: “We started with mobile phones because there was not much competition in the market at that time: a low-value product, different from a car, very risky. Everyone said we would go bankrupt. And here we are today, breaking even and generating cash.”
But how to prevent cell phone theft fraud through false theft notifications? “We have to believe that a large portion of the population is made up of good citizens,” says Katagwiri. “The fraudster is a minority. But we have to be good with the data, in our predictive model, to catch the fraudster.” Pier installs the insurance application on the client’s device, whose geolocation is monitored, subject to authorization. About 70% of Pier’s mobile phone base are iPhones, but any brand can be insured.
“Our accident rate is currently 30%. We accept cell phones without receipts, if a person loses them or buys them used, we have no waiting period, we accept them under the age of use, things that most people do not accept. Once we have the latest data on the stolen cell phone, we quickly pay into the customer’s account, because nowadays no one goes more than a day without their device. In fact, more than an hour without it,” says Katagwiri. The average cell phone insurance ticket is R $ 60 per month. The company has already paid more than R$200 million in claims since its founding.
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