A new service aimed at delivering real-time data insights within 24 hours promises to boost business decisions and competitiveness of SME (small to medium-sized enterprise) financial services companies in South Africa.  

Data from the South African Revenue Services estimates that there are about 18 000 medium-sized companies in South Africa, employing between 50 and 200 people each, with a total of more than 1.7-million employees in the category. 

Financial services companies in the SME sector are seen as particularly well placed to leverage advantages from technology by extracting data insights to manage exposure to risk.

“Building an internal analytics capability is expensive and complex.  Our aim is to quickly, seamlessly and affordably provide SMEs with valuable business insights enabling better business decision-making and improving market competitiveness. We can provide an analytics platform that can deliver real time insights for the business within 24 hours,” says Explore Insights head Dewald Botha. 

Explore Insights is a division of the Explore group, which founded the data science training institution, Explore Data Science Academy South Africa.  

In order to deliver its data analytics service the company draws on the expertise of over 80 data scientists within group - many of whom have been trained within its training institution and now work on international projects outsourced to the group.

According to Botha, many of the data sources within businesses are isolated and hard to analyse and Explore Insights has developed an analytics platform that allows for a business centralised view of a company’s data, providing instant insights.

“This is our flagship product offering - one that will provide a platform and real-time insights within 24 hours (on key data sources of companies),” Botha says.

Explore Insights provides a number of additional services, ranging from report creation, skills transfer, to a permanent ongoing outsourced resource. 

Some of the custom solutions developed for companies by the team at Explore Insights include:

• Buyer/seller matching - matches buyers to sellers of motor vehicles based on their likelihood of approval
• Street pricing - scrapes competitor prices for pet insurance to inform price points
• Claims assessor support – captures and validates PDF invoices digitally to speed up claims processes
• AI underwriting -  (also API) predicts default probability based on financials, said to outperformed human underwriters
• Intelligent OCR -  digitises PDF financial and bank statements, storing the data and providing insights
• Predictive reporting  - an automated dashboard showing exposure, risk and expected loss metrics by various dimensions

The company adds that it hopes to extend its offerings into the rest of Africa and internationally.