Launched Venture: M:WISE
M:WISE is an AI-powered warranty management automation system for OEMs, built by BCG Digital Ventures in partnership with MSX International. We caught up with DV Partner and Director Akin Soysal to find out more about the venture.
This week, BCG Digital Ventures, in partnership with MSX International, launched M:WISE, an AI-powered warranty management system to streamline and improve the automotive warranty management process.
We caught up with DV Partner and Director Akin Soysal, who worked on M:WISE, to tell us more about the venture, how it was built, and its place in the market.
DV: What is M:WISE?
Akin Soysal: M:WISE is a new warranty control system for OEMs, helping them to manage and reduce their warranty expenses.
What problems does M:WISE seek to solve?
OEMs currently have extremely high warranty management costs. They have two levers with which to manage this: They can work to produce better cars through engineering, something they constantly try to do, and they can also manage their warranty process better. There’s a lot of waste in the warranty process, meaning dealers claim too many hours and assign incorrect or needless repairs. So having a systematic control system around that really helps to reduce costs massively.
Why do you think there’s a specific opportunity now in the space?
Car manufacturers are facing increasing pressure to manage their cost issues. You see attempts to save costs across the sector. One big aspect of this is warranty expenses, and this is where M:WISE comes in. OEMs spend $50 billion annually on warranty expenses, and helping them to manage this more effectively drives a lot of value.
Technology has advanced to such a level as it’s able to support such a complex control system. The entire system is Artificial Intelligence-based, and today it’s easier to bring these technologies together to build a cohesive, advanced system.
What was the process in building M:WISE? Who worked on the venture?
The business of helping car manufacturers reducing their warranty spend is not new. MSXI has managed this process in a manual manner in the past, which involves a lot of people.
They have amazing assets in terms of data and client relationships, which is great. We came in and helped them to develop M:WISE, which leans heavily on the data sets they have and their experience and contacts with the OEM world and adds a layer of technology to increase efficiency and decrease legwork.
We assembled a completely new team combining DV and MSXI talent in our Berlin center. First we completed a phase where we asked ourselves what was possible, what the product should look like and what would work in the market, leveraging MSXI’s domain expertise and DV’s experience building digital products. After that we started to build the product out of our Berlin center as a joint team.
MSXI has built a new innovation hub here in Berlin and the whole M:WISE team are now running the business from there. We hired 20 people to work on M:WISE, building up a completely new team and culture.
Using AI and ML to get the most out of data assets was obviously very helpful in putting together M:WISE. Do you see this as a growing trend?
Completely. If you take healthcare, for example, there’s a lot of movement. A company in Berlin has just received a regulatory licence to use AI technology to scan for breast cancer. It’s really growing, and you’re starting to see it everywhere. So many tasks will start to lean on this technology in the coming years.
What was your proudest moment in building M:WISE?
The standout moment for me was when we secured our first customer. These are big, big contracts, typically around €50 million. So the first one we secured felt great, it was a validation that what we were building really makes sense for the industry.
What will the platform look like on launch?
The initial focus was warranty management and controlling warranty expenses and that will be present on launch. During the three-month pilot phase, alone, we managed to lift the accuracy of the AI-assisted claim assessment to more than 96%. We hope to soon encompass the whole warranty process, end-to-end.
At the moment, expenses are dealt with after the fact, so the car dealer sends in the request and the person managing the warranty will query it if it’s false or too high. But ultimately the goal is to have M:WISE manage the entire process, to have a system that’s already used at the dealer so as to prevent these expenses from occurring in the first place. The vision for M:WISE is to be an end-to-end warranty management system. I’m very confident that, with their new team, M:WISE will be able to achieve this.
You can find out more about M:WISE here.
Read the press release here.
Find out more about MSX International here.
Interested in working with us at BCGDV? Want to find out more? See our current vacancies.
Find us on Twitter @BCGDV.
