Claims intake: The quickest route to improvement

Aurora Voss, co-founder and CEO of Zemble, will take the stage at the 2025 AICLA/ANZIIF Claims Convention to argue that claims intake is overlooked as the insurance industry's lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to unlocking efficiency, trust, and innovation across the claims value chain.

“When claims teams focus on intake, everything changes,” says Voss.

She isn’t talking about digitising PDFs or adding a basic “tell us what happened” form to a website.

Voss means flexible, governed pathways that adapt to context and capture complete, trusted data from the start.

“It’s deceptively simple,” she says. “When insurers treat intake as admin, they miss the chance to create efficiency and build trust. Done well, intake makes the 80% of claims faster and frees professionals to focus on the complex 20% where their expertise matters most.”

Her message is clear: intake isn’t admin, it’s strategy. Without a proper strategy, workflow automation and AI can't be deployed to their fullest potential.

With it, claims teams unlock faster decisions, stronger trust, and the foundations for innovation.

An unconventional path

Voss co-founded Zemble, a platform purpose-built to streamline and govern data intake, to tackle this challenge.

But her path wasn’t linear. After a two-year stint with the NHS in the UK and five years in Spain as an interpreter, Voss worked in education-tech and financial services before moving into venture capital and investing in early-stage fintechs.

“The richness of insurance, the people, the problems and the opportunities all drew me in,” she says.

“In fintech-focused venture capital, I saw what great founders could achieve under regulatory pressure. That experience laid the foundation for the insurtech innovation we’re seeing now.”

Why intake, why now?

Zemble’s sharp focus on claims intake is recent, but it comes after six years of working with claims teams of all sizes and business lines.

“Our first product was a claims case management and digital portal solution,” Voss shares. “Even with those tools, so much claims and application data never makes it through a portal."

That gap creates inefficiency, compliance risk, and frustration for customers and professionals alike. It also reinforced a key truth: claims is a team sport.

“Sometimes it’s direct; customer to insurer, sometimes it’s customer to broker to insurer. Then you add supply chains, adjusters and contractors, and suddenly, you have a web of parties involved.

From an infrastructure perspective, there are portals everywhere, none of them designed to talk to each other.”

That fragmentation, she argues, is exactly why intake is the industry’s lowest-hanging fruit.

“The challenge is getting the right data in, cleanly, compliantly, and in a way that benefits and educates the customer, while making it usable across all those stakeholders.”

Beyond first notice of loss

At Zemble, claims data is far more than first notice of loss (FNOL), Voss says.

“The opportunity is to keep enriching core systems after FNOL, without forcing internal users to jump across screens, or requiring customers to log into portals and chase updates across scattered emails and documents.”

Generic form tools haven’t solved the problem.

“They fall apart with multi-party submissions, conditional requirements, or data governance," Voss says. "That’s why teams still default to email, PDFs, and spreadsheets.”

By contrast, Zemble is a purpose-built intake layer. Dynamic pathways adapt in real time, multi-party workflows eliminate email sprawl and governance required like redaction and retention is automated.

Data flows connect directly into claims, underwriting or risk systems, which means that in practice, a D&O [Directors and Officers] claim involving multiple insured directors, brokers and legal advisors can run through a single structured workflow instead of a patchwork of PDFs and emails.

"Zemble ensures each party submits the right information, redacts sensitive details where required, and makes the structured data immediately available to the insurer’s core systems," Voss explains.

In a life claim, a customer is guided to provide exactly the right supporting documentation at the right moment, reducing painful back-and-forth.

And in property or liability claims, contractor and supplier updates flow into the same governed pipeline without creating compliance risk.

“The result isn’t just reduced admin—it’s faster triage, cleaner evidence capture, stronger compliance and a smoother experience for everyone involved,” Voss says.

Partnership over disruption

According to Voss, the insurtech narrative has matured.

“The disruptor story has faded," she says. "The real transformation comes from long-term partnerships—insurtechs and insurers solving problems together.”

Top insurtechs are defined by curiosity and persistence, she says. “It’s about asking hard questions and staying the course alongside customers.”

Relationships will always be central to the business of insurance.

“The highlight of my career has been the people: our customers, my team, other founders, and the professionals who keep showing up for this industry," Voss says.

"For example, serving on the board of Insurtech Australia was a privilege, and those connections mean everything.”

The hardest part? “Balancing the speed of being a founder with the patience it takes to truly solve long term problems for customers," she says. Her proudest achievement is "building products and partnerships customers can rely on".

The lever for uplift

Ahead of the 2025 AICLA/ANZIIF Claims Convention presentation, Voss is focussed on her core theme.

“Most claims organisations invest heavily in technology from the inside out," she observes. "But they tend not to apply the same rigour to how they collect data.

"And while personal lines claims like auto and home have seen some incredible gains with digital FNOL and straight through processing, there’s a level of paralysis when it comes to finding ways to automate the more complex claims.”

The reality is that intake must reflect the fact that claims is a team sport.

“Data doesn’t just flow one way," she explains. "It moves between customers, brokers, insurers, contractors, and suppliers.

"If intake is fragmented, the whole chain feels it. If it’s structured and governed, everyone and every system benefits.”

That’s why intake is the low hanging fruit of a transformation: "It’s simple, actionable, and delivers immediate uplift in both efficiency and trust," Voss says.

"The benefits show up quickly. Decisions are faster because complex submissions like multi-party D&O claims start with complete, structured data.

"Customers and brokers feel more confident because they know exactly what’s expected of them from the outset and compliance is safer because sensitive information is automatically redacted with data retention rules enforced."

Ultimately, teams are more effective because they spend less time chasing missing details and more time resolving the claim.

And, Voss adds, that's what turns AI from a buzzword into a safe, inspectable capability.

Looking ahead

For all her pragmatism, Voss is deeply optimistic.

“If you stay curious and persistent, that’s when transformation takes root," she says. "At first it’s subtle, but then it becomes like a muscle. If you stick with it you’ll get toned and strong.”

Her takeaway for the industry is that true innovation doesn’t always start with sweeping programs or big-bang AI deployments.

"It often begins with small, bite-sized changes; things you can test, prove, and scale.

"Claims intake is a perfect example. It's simple to start, powerful to grow and transformative once embedded."

Hear Aurora Voss speak at the 2025 Claims Convention