Scout InsurTech Rising with HelixIntel

Matt Rutter is the COO of HelixIntel, a company that makes it easier for insurers and maintenance teams to work together on loss prevention. Maintenance teams run HelixCMMS to manage their work at the property, and HelixPrevent is the risk intelligence layer that turns that activity into portfolio signal for risk selection, underwriting and loss control recommendations. Matt was interviewed by Andrew Daniels, Co-founder at Scout InsurTech, to discuss how HelixIntel drives success for both insurers and policyholders and how AI accelerates the trend toward continuous, behavior-informed insurer risk management services.

Matt, HelixIntel was built with maintenance teams in mind. What problem are those teams facing today, and how does HelixIntel reduce the cognitive load of managing a facility?

“Maintenance has been our North Star since the beginning. When Jon Dewald founded the company after walking the halls of a public school in Washington, D.C., and realized, based on the state of the facility, that its maintenance team simply could not get what it needed. We know these teams are understaffed and under-resourced, and that they could really benefit from the tools we build. Those tools help them organize their day and reduce their cognitive load. For example, a maintenance lead no longer has to stop and think about which quarterly maintenance tasks are due this week or this month. The platform pushes a notification that says, ‘Change that filter,’ or ‘Check that pipe fitting.’ And they can close out the task with a tap of their phone screen. In short, we help these teams do what they already want to do, and do it better.

How does the HelixIntel model create value for both policyholders and insurers, rather than treating risk management as another compliance obligation?

“We found that the gap between insurers and policyholders was a durable problem. Insurers are asked to reduce risk and deliver value to their policyholders at the same time, and those two goals do not always point in the same direction. It can feel like they are asking for a lot, and policyholders are left wondering what is in it for them. On the other side of the equation, policyholders and their maintenance teams are resource-constrained. In many cases, institutional know-how is literally retiring. Many maintenance leaders are over 50 and scheduled to step away in the coming years. So how do we fill that gap?

We provide a two-sided platform. Insurers give HelixCMMS to maintenance teams that would never have had budget for it. It gives those teams the checklists and virtual tools they need to do their jobs every day, and to do them a bit more easily. Insurers get a lower risk facility because when maintenance teams get something they truly need, the facility runs better.  It is a win-win. You could call it the golden circle of insurance.”

Where are you seeing the strongest market traction, and why do focused programs, such as agriculture, small manufacturing, and SMB, respond especially well?

“Verticals often represent more homogeneous risk. That makes it easier for our insurance partners to take on a vertical or sector with shared risks and dive deeply into it. They can ask: What risks are driving our losses? What recommendations can we make that will add value for our policyholders while also getting ahead of the risks that drive our claims?

We also know that HelixCMMS, and computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) more broadly, have a long history in manufacturing and agriculture. By democratizing CMMS and making it more broadly available and applicable, we are extending the lessons learned in manufacturing and agriculture to other sectors. I think that is why we have found success in those two areas. Public entities are also a core market for us. Schools and municipalities are where the company started, and that work shaped a lot of what we know about what these teams need. The operating realities in a school district rhyme with the realities of the manufacturers and agricultural operations our partners write."

What have you learned about driving adoption with insurance partners, and what does your renewal and expansion experience say about the product’s value after launch?

“We’ve learned that service is critical. Insurers have been offered a wide variety of risk mitigation technologies over the years. Some are good in theory, but moving them from concept to implementation requires service. Every insurer is different, so our team spends a significant amount of time understanding each insurer's needs and the unique risks that stem from the mix within its book or portfolio. We then design an awareness and engagement campaign for policyholders that is tailored to that insurer's book. In other words, we invest heavily up front in understanding the insurer's needs, how it wants to go to market, and who its policyholders are.

When word reaches policyholders that this tool is available to them through their insurer, our dedicated customer success team immediately gets on the phone, demonstrates the platform, and shows them the tools their insurer is providing. If they decide to move forward, they can opt into one-hour onboarding sessions led by another dedicated team. We help them log in, add their equipment, and get their work orders underway. We also give them what we call ‘homework,’ which is really work they would be doing anyway. We simply make sure they know how to do it, and if we can preload some of that information for them, they get a head start. So we spend a great deal of time onboarding both insurers and their policyholders.

It should also be said that we put significant effort into transferring data. We care deeply about bringing meaningful data from both the policyholder and the insurer onto our platform, so that over time it feels native to them.”

Looking ahead, how will AI and product features like HelixIntel’s Loss Control Connect help insurers move from annual loss-control interactions to more continuous, behavior-informed risk management?

“I view this as a spectrum. AI is transformative for many people in many ways. For us, it means we can ingest more data than ever before. From those different data sources, we can refine a signal, and that behavioral signal is something insurers simply do not have today. Think about how insurers underwrite a property: construction, occupancy, and exposure. They may also layer in new tools, such as drone or satellite imagery telling them about a roof. What they may lack is a reliable view of what is happening within the walls.

Once we ingest that data, we can distill a signal, and insurers can use that behavioral signal to help them better select and price risk. Then, the question becomes how to manage that risk over the term. That is really what HelixPrevent is for. It is where the signal is identified and where the insurer decides what to do with it, with recommendations tailored to their loss runs and portfolio. Previously, when they sent a recommendation to a policyholder it was sent as a pdf, email, or physical letter. In other words, hard to act on.  Now it shows up in HelixCMMS as work the maintenance team can schedule like anything else, and when the work gets done, that completion goes back to the insurer, and we close the behavioral loop. 

AI is what makes this practical.  It dramatically compresses the time frame for what we could have done previously, which makes this approach more feasible than ever before.”