Scout InsurTech Rising with NayaOne

Scott Sambucci is the Managing Director, North America and Europe at NayaOne, the leading VDI helping enterprises discover, validate, and scale third-party tech - safely, repeatedly, and fast. Scott was interviewed by Michael Fiedel, Co-Founder at Scout InsurTech and Co-Founder at PolicyFly, Inc.

Scott, can you walk us through the pivotal moments that enabled NayaOne’s recent growth and what that means for the company in the near term?

There are three pivotal moments that have driven our recent growth.

The first was foundational when Karan started the company about almost six years ago, based on his experience as the Head of Technology at an international bank. What made that moment significant was not simply launching the business but the broader shift happening in the market. At that time, banks and large insurance companies were grappling with an influx of fintech and insurtech point solutions. While at the bank, Karan realized they could no longer build everything themselves. This was a major departure from the legacy mindset of purchasing massive monolithic systems for lending, claims management, underwriting, and customer relationships. The proliferation of specialized solutions overwhelmed technology teams and flipped the script. Suddenly, partnering and buying became necessary, creating exactly the conditions where NayaOne could thrive.

However, when it came to testing and assessing potential vendors and partners, there was no fast way for Karan and his team to run rapid PoCs or kick the tires on new tech. He went to market searching for an external sandbox, saw one did not exist, and so started NayaOne to be that air-gapped, off-estate environment for FIs to test new technology quickly.

The second pivotal moment was the rapid evolution of AI and generative AI. It was not that every insurer immediately decided they had to adopt AI. Rather, AI became the catalyst for recognizing how critical it is to have secure controlled environments to test emerging technology. There is still a lot of uncertainty around AI, so it naturally opened the door for conversations about safe experimentation. In many ways, AI became the tip of the spear that led to broader discussions about testing everything safely and responsibly, whether it is fraud detection or document processing.

Finally, the third key moment has been driven by our own customers. As more clients joined the platform and used it longer, they have become increasingly sophisticated in how they apply it. We hand over the control to customers on how they use the platform, and which what you want in a platform technology. Customers are innovating in ways we never imagined. As a result, NayaOne has evolved from a place to run side by side vendor comparisons into a core component of enterprise vendor delivery infrastructure. Today, we see heads of technology, enterprise architects, and chief data officers adopting NayaOne as an enterprise wide solution instead of something product or innovation teams use in isolation.

What makes NayaOne a necessary utility rather than just a nice-to-have innovation partner for insurance carriers today?

It comes down to the reality that our clients operate in highly regulated financial industries. Regulations around data sharing, privacy, and compliance are extensive. Any time an insurer wants to introduce a new piece of technology, whether AI-related or otherwise, they must run a rigorous risk, compliance, and security assessment, all for good reason – to protect the institution and their customers.

These assessments take time, often many months, even years, which creates a critical bottleneck. Meanwhile, new insurance companies are entering the market with specialized offerings, and point solutions are emerging constantly. The only way for established market leaders to keep pace is to test and prototype quickly.

What we hear from our customers over and over is that without NayaOne, they would always be twelve months behind their competition. Startups and digital native players do not face the same lengthy compliance processes.

By enabling clients to quickly test, validate, and de-risk new technologies in a secure sandbox environment, we transform what would otherwise be a slow cumbersome process into something nimble and repeatable. That is why NayaOne is not just-a-nice to have. It is a core utility insurers must rely on to remain competitive.

The NayaOne platform has supported hundreds of proof of concepts over the years. Which emerging technologies or business challenges are most frequently tested, and what patterns are you seeing across organizations?

Across all those proofs of concept, we see four main categories of activity.

The first is fraud detection. This starts with point solutions like KYB, Know Your Business, and KYC, Know Your Customer, which help insurers validate that a customer or company is legitimate and compliant with anti money laundering guidelines. From there, it extends into cybersecurity and information security, where teams need to monitor security perimeters for millions of potential threats and ensure they are not missing actual risks.

The second category is AI and generative AI. Interestingly, most insurers are not yet evaluating vendors to make purchase decisions right away. They are trying to learn and see what these AI tools can even do. Our platform is often used for what we call immersions. Clients load multiple chatbots or language models and let product, engineering, and leadership teams explore their capabilities in a safe environment. This helps them see what is possible, decide where governance should be established, and avoid the problem of needing policies before they can start testing.

Third, we see strong interest in general automation and back office efficiency gains. This includes solutions like OCR to extract data from documents in claims, underwriting, and legal workflows. Anywhere there is manual processing, there is opportunity for automation.

Finally, claims is a significant area of focus. We have built an entire Claims Lab available in NayaOne with pre-built PoCs and recommended vendors. We have mapped out the jobs to be done across the claims process – from first notice of loss (FNOL) through to litigation and payment – with each step offering an opportunity for insurers to improve efficiency and customer experience.

The overarching pattern is that insurers are increasingly using our platform not just to evaluate individual tools but to drive end-to-end modernization initiatives.

What role does NayaOne play in aligning product and innovation teams with the demands of enterprise architecture and CTO oversight?

One of the biggest challenges we hear from enterprise architecture and technology leaders is the proliferation of “snowflakes.” Not the product Snowflake, but “snowflake” vendors, unique solutions bought by different teams that do not fit into the organization’s core architecture or data models.

When product or innovation teams procure these tools in isolation, it creates massive headaches later. Vendors sit unused or go live without any guarantee of interoperability, which makes the entire technology landscape harder to govern.

NayaOne acts like a skeleton key between the exploratory energy of product teams and the structural discipline of enterprise technology groups. On one hand, we give product and innovation teams the freedom to evaluate and experiment. On the other, we give enterprise architects and risk leaders confidence that every proof of concept includes standardized KPIs, consistent requirements, and secure processes.

This combination ensures that when a vendor is ultimately selected, the organization can move quickly without creating another snowflake. Everything is measured against a common set of criteria, and everyone is aligned around a shared philosophy of how technology should be evaluated and adopted.

What key outcomes or changes does NayaOne hope to achieve over the next 6 to 12 months, and how will those shape your positioning in the insurance market?

Our biggest priority is growing the team so we can support our customers even more. We have been fortunate to have strong growth, and as more clients come onto the platform, we want to ensure we can deliver high-touch support.

Part of that expansion includes hiring more subject matter experts with deep experience in claims, underwriting, and legal functions. That expertise allows us to partner with clients side by side instead of simply handing them a sandbox and hoping for the best. Ultimately, we want clients to feel confident they have a guide as they build new capabilities, and that over time, they can start running initiatives independently within the platform.

From a product perspective, we are continuing to evolve to serve the enterprise. That means aligning more closely with CTOs and enterprise architects, supporting a wider range of cloud environments, and integrating with core systems.

A good example is our partnership with NVIDIA. NVIDIA is making big moves into software, creating blueprints insurers can use to deploy AI-powered solutions like chatbots or automated security monitoring. All of that is now accessible in our sandbox. 

Another is with the cloud service providers – AWS, GCP and Azure. Each has their own marketplace of AI and agentic solutions that many of their own customers aren’t able to access because their AI tools have not been vetted and approved by their risk and security teams.   Because NayaOne is an air-gapped, off-estate environment, customers can safely and securely access the CSP AI tools for testing and building.

In the big picture, our goal is to make sure we are not just keeping up with where the market is going but anticipating it. We want to be the platform insurers rely on to safely innovate at scale, not just evaluate the latest tools.