1. What motivated your company to participate in the Global Tech Awards?

FINEOS participated in the Global Tech Awards to showcase a fundamentally different approach to AI innovation within the insurance industry. While many organisations focused on proof-of-concept experiments, FINEOS invested in solving the more complex challenge of making AI truly production-ready for one of the world's most highly regulated sectors. The awards provide an opportunity to highlight how responsible AI, built on governance, explainability, fairness and compliance, can deliver real business value and transform insurance operations at scale.

2. Could you share an overview of the project or innovation your company submitted?

Our submission, FINEOS: Production-First AI for the Insurance Industry, focuses on an AI platform designed specifically for life, accident and health insurers. Rather than building AI capabilities first and addressing compliance later, we embedded governance, security, privacy, explainability and regulatory alignment directly into the platform architecture from day one. A key innovation is our proprietary AI bias testing framework, which helps insurers evaluate fairness and transparency before AI reaches production. This enables customers to move from concept to live deployment quickly while maintaining trust and regulatory confidence.

3. How has your team worked together to bring this innovation to life?

Delivering this innovation required collaboration across the entire organisation. Teams from R&D, legal, compliance, IT operations, HR and finance worked together across North America, Europe and Australia to create a shared vision for enterprise-scale, trustworthy AI. By bringing together expertise from technology, regulation, governance and business operations, we were able to build a platform that addresses not only technical requirements but also the operational and compliance realities of the insurance industry.

4. What impact do you anticipate your innovation will have on the tech industry or society at large?

We believe this innovation will help shift the conversation around AI from experimentation to responsible production deployment. In industries where trust and compliance are critical, organisations need confidence that AI can operate fairly, transparently and safely. By embedding governance and bias testing into the platform, we are helping insurers accelerate innovation while protecting customers during some of life's most important moments, including illness, injury, disability and bereavement. More broadly, we hope to establish a model for how regulated industries can adopt AI responsibly and at scale.

5. Are there any specific challenges you faced during the development process, and how did you overcome them?

The greatest challenge was balancing innovation with the complex regulatory and governance requirements that exist across multiple global markets. Emerging regulations such as the EU AI Act and other regional standards continue to evolve rapidly. We addressed this by treating regulatory requirements as product design inputs from the outset rather than compliance issues to solve later. We also developed a proprietary bias testing framework and embedded governance, auditability and explainability directly into the platform, ensuring these capabilities become standard for every AI deployment.

6. How does your company foster a culture of innovation?

Innovation at FINEOS is driven by long-term investment, collaboration and a willingness to tackle difficult industry challenges. Since becoming a public company in 2019, FINEOS has invested more than €350 million in developing its platform and continues to dedicate approximately 30% of annual revenue to research and development. A key enabler of this culture is the FINEOS Playbook, which provides a clear strategic framework that aligns teams around a common purpose, priorities and way of working. It ensures innovation is purpose-led rather than technology-led, helping us focus on solving meaningful customer and industry challenges while staying aligned to our long-term vision and business objectives. We encourage cross-functional collaboration, bringing together experts from technology, compliance, legal, operations and business functions to solve complex problems. This combination of strategic clarity, customer focus and sustained investment enables us to create practical, scalable innovations that deliver measurable outcomes for insurers and their customers.

7. What advice would you give to other companies striving to make an impact in the tech space?

Focus on solving real industry problems rather than chasing short-term technology trends. Sustainable innovation comes from understanding customer needs, regulatory realities and operational challenges. Building strong foundations, whether in governance, security, compliance or scalability, may require more effort upfront, but it creates the conditions for long-term success. Most importantly, collaborate across disciplines, because transformational innovation rarely happens within a single team or function.

8. What are your company's future goals, and how do you plan to drive advancements in your industry?

Our mission is to be the global market leader in core systems for life, accident and health insurance on a single technology platform. We will continue to invest heavily in research and development, expand AI capabilities across the FINEOS Platform, and help insurers modernise their operations through cloud-based, data-driven and AI-enabled solutions. By combining deep industry expertise with ongoing innovation, we aim to provide insurers with the technology foundation they need to deliver better customer experiences and operate more efficiently in an increasingly digital world.

9. Are there any emerging technologies or trends your company is particularly excited about?

We are particularly excited about the potential of agentic AI and intelligent agents embedded directly within compliant insurance workflows. We are already seeing insurers achieve promising early wins with AI in proof-of-concept environments. The next opportunity is to take those capabilities beyond experimentation and bring them safely into production at scale. For FINEOS, that means embedding intelligent agents into trusted insurance workflows, where they can work alongside people to automate routine activities, navigate complex processes and support faster, better-informed decisions. By combining the power of agentic AI with the governance, controls and deep domain expertise required in a highly regulated industry, we believe insurers can move from isolated AI successes to meaningful, enterprise-wide impact.

To dive deeper into Fineos award-winning work, visit their website at https://www.fineos.com/