Avantia Group, the digital home insurance platform and the parent company behind award-winning direct-to-consumer home insurance brand Homeprotect is rewriting the rules of claims management, with the announcement of an industry-first AI solution named ‘Holmes’, designed to tackle fraud and transform home insurance claims.
Fraudulent claims continue to severely impact the insurance sector in the UK. According to the Association of British Insurers, fraudulent property insurance claims cost the industry more than £143 million each year. Current detection methods have limitations, resulting in slower outcomes for genuine customers, higher operational costs, and undetected fraud causing premium inflation for policyholders.
To help address this, Avantia has created a new solution to disrupt the traditional home insurance claims process. Built on its existing proprietary decisioning platform, Holmes is trained to use a vast amount of data gathered internally through the customer lifecycle and supports handlers by rapidly identifying potential fraudulent activity, as well as flagging straightforward cases for quick and fair resolution.
In initial trials which have taken place in Q2 2025, Holmes exceeded expectations – improving fraud detection accuracy and highlighting cases ready for quick settlement. Avantia also found that its new AI solution proved to have much broader benefits than its original use case, making recommendations about claim coverage, payment amounts, data capture and next steps, particularly on highly complex claims. As a result, Avantia has identified significant operational and indemnity cost savings from rolling Holmes out to all claims, which will enable the business to scale faster and invest the savings in enhancing their product to the benefit of all customers.
In controlled tests, Holmes not only helped make Avantia’s fraud detection rate x6 more effective, it was also able to complete payment calculations with a 98% accuracy and make additional recommendations in 50% of cases which meaningfully improved the outcome of a claim for Homeprotect and customers.
Dan Huddart, CTO at Avantia Group, said:
“What we’ve seen from Holmes is proof that AI is a game changer and that forward-thinking insurers should be ready to rip up the rulebook and completely redesign their claims management teams and systems.”
“We adopted an AI strategy back in 2016, choosing to build our own machine learning platform and data science teams because we wanted to make intelligent, automated decisions right across our business. The idea for our new AI solution came from a hack day where our team wanted to tackle fraud in a novel way using the platform and data we already had available. Like many great projects it has evolved and achieved far more than we ever expected.
“Holmes is being used to assist rather than replace claims handlers. The real power of AI comes from being able to interpret a vast amount of data in seconds, surfacing context and insight to support our team who can apply judgement and make the final decision. We think AI and humans each have unique skills, and the best service comes from enabling them to work together.
We were early adopters of AI and are now designing our entire operation around it because we can see it gives us and our customers tangible benefits, with improved processing time and consistency in the handling of a claim. I believe this is the most advanced implementation of GenAI to date in the home insurance market.”
Mark Eastham, CEO at Avantia Group, added:
“Fraud is one of the biggest issues facing the insurance industry today, and it directly impacts all customers – slowing down their claims and impacting their premiums. This is an innovative approach that tackles that head-on, that I believe will give us a market-leading opportunity to deliver a fairer, faster experience for our home insurance customers.”
Holmes is expected to help process live claims from September 2025 with the launch marking another step in Avantia’s commitment to innovation, customer-first service, and digital leadership in the insurance space – helping improve speed, fairness, and clarity for customers.