BestFit: Interview with one of the most extraordinary and successful entrepreneurs Sonja Kohn

BestFit is a behavioral science platform that has been combining human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) since 2015. The business innovation generates the kind of data that is also important for insurance companies. The platform focuses on „digital“, „data“ and „gamification“. While there is a lot of talk about generative artificial intelligence or generative AI, there are only a few use cases. One of them is BestFit.

thebroker spoke to Sonja Kohn, founder and managing partner of BestFit.

Ms. Kohn, you seem to be an incredibly enterprising entrepreneur. Coming from Austria, you have founded successful companies together with UniCredit Bank Austria, Austria’s largest bank. How did that come about?

I lived in the United States for a few years from 1985 onwards and was dubbed „The Viennese of Wall Street“ back then, as I was the point of contact for Austrian trade delegations. This led to a long and successful collaboration with Bank Austria.

I had the idea – it was an elephant with six legs at the time – to issue a zero coupon bond whose return was linked to Standard & Poor’s. In practical terms, this meant that Bank Austria, which had an AAA rating at the time, issued a fund that paid no interest but was linked to the American market. My idea came in very handy for the bank and that was the first collaboration between us.

In 1994, you founded the financial services company Medici and in 1999, in a joint venture with Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest bank, you founded the online platform for investment funds „Funds World“.

That was my first digital company at the time. In 1999, we had a market analysis carried out to find out what was still missing in Europe. Similar to Bank Austria, practically every bank in Europe already had international products at the time, but these were sold through branches. My idea at the time was to create a digital platform that would sell international funds. While this already existed in the US with Charles Schwab, for example, we were one of the first in Europe. This resulted in the most successful „asset gathering machine“ for Intesa, with the result that they bought me out and integrated the employees and platform into Intesa.

Medici GmbH was initially a sales company I founded for Bank Austria products. Bank Medici emerged from this in 2003 and was owned 25 percent (+ one share) by Bank Austria and 75 percent (- one share) by me.

The fact that we harmonized well is proven by the fact that Eliano Lodesani, who was the COO of Intesa until two years ago, is one of the people who work with me at Best Fit.

What drives you to keep founding new companies?

I don’t know, it’s my nature. Whatever I do is a response to market needs. Staff has become more and more expensive and so it was important for me to use the internet to enable a democratization of service. Because if you bring less than half a million or a million to the bank, depending on the bank, you don’t even have an advisor. Digitally, we are able to offer a personalized service to people with smaller wallets.

Just as I believe in digitalization, I believe that if all these digital initiatives from Metaverse to Generative AI are to be successful in the long term, people have to like them. If you ask 100 people what they like, you will get 100 answers. And this is where BestFit comes in. In a world where you no longer spend half an hour a month with an advisor, you still get a personalized service.

When one reads the name BestFit, one is inclined to think of a dating platform. Does the company have anything to do with this?

On dating platforms, everyone tries to show their best side. In Human Resources, everyone thinks about what the best answer might be. He or she is not who he or she really is. The BestFit platform only has indirect questions. For example: You receive an invitation to the moon, what is your reaction? The answer can vary between: „Great! Let’s go“, „I still have to think about it“ and: „No, thanks“. This type of question allows us to draw a conclusion about the person without creating tendencies. The development is based on Nobel Prize-winning science.

An ideal platform for the insurance industry too?

What I’ve managed to do in the last few years is find some wonderful customers, including the Zurich Insurance Group. We have also worked with Allianz and Wüstenrot. At BestFit, there are only ten of us. Fortunately, I have also managed to involve two Nobel Prize winners in this collaboration. Gartner Research named us a „Cool Vendor“ and awarded us an Insurtech prize.

Two Nobel Prize winners?

One is Prof. Robert J. Aumann, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his „theory of repeated games that expands our understanding of the preconditions for cooperation“. The other is Vernon L. Smith for „establishing laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, particularly in the study of alternative market mechanisms“. He received the prize together with Daniel Kahnemann.

What exactly do you do at BestFit?

What we do is „match“ by determining the best fit between people, customers, products and services. Our team has identified over 35 different personal characteristics. For example: Do people make rational or emotional decisions? Should you send them a schedule? A competitive analysis or a testimonial from a happy customer? What is a person’s level of sophistication? What about the „risk appetite“, are people more proactive, optimists or pessimists?

In contrast to today, where data is defined and questions are asked such as: how old you are and where you live or what you have bought or looked at on the Internet, we just want to understand the person. We want to know what is important to them, how they make decisions or how to communicate with them. This information is important for all industries.

Are you interested in strategic partnerships?

I am now at a stage where I would like to have a strategic partner. In the last couple of years I have focused on building up and finding some very high quality customers as a proof of concept. Now we need to scale up. BestFit is suitable for the entire medical industry, for retail and the insurance industry. We are also a solution for compliance or call centers that can get real-time analytics from us. In short, our possibilities are limitless.

The BestFit website says that the world of „big data“ as we know it is dead and with it the conventional concept of age. What do you mean by that?

I don’t believe that the world of „big data“ is dead, but that it is very limited because it ignores individuals. In contrast to „big data“, BestFit is able to provide micro data.

Age is a very relative thing. My husband (83) and I, for example, are very healthy and therefore only place a small burden on our health insurance. Nevertheless, we found an advertisement in our letterbox with an alarm button and a walking aid. It doesn’t work like that! There are people who are old at 25 and some who are young at 80. I think the focus on demographics is very limited.

What is BestFit and what does it do?

BestFit is a generative AI platform that understands a person’s characteristics in just two minutes via a charming online experience. We pass this information on to customers in order to personalize communication and offers. Our Chief Scientist Prof. Dr. Moran Cerf, Professor of Neuroscience and Business at Columbia University, says: „We make thoughts visible, transform information into insights and allow our business customers to communicate with the brains of their customers.“

BestFit is an innovative solution for the classic white elephants. Working with Bank Austria and Intesa with their 120,000 employees, I have learned to dance with white elephants. It takes patience, experience and respect for existing structures to implement innovations. What is important is not new ideas, but new solutions.

At the end of the questions, we send a prompt to ChatGPT, which contains the following information, for example: What language and how many words should be used? What does the insurance company want to achieve? And others. After the person has answered about 10 – 15 charming questions, the BestFit platform gives a hyper-personalized message.

What do insurance companies gain by using BestFit?

On the one hand, it is an increase in profitability, on the other hand more and more satisfied customers as well as an increase in efficiency, as agents can respond to the customer much more precisely and thus save time and costs.

One of our Swiss insurance customers achieved an NPS growth of (Net Promoter Score for customer loyalty and satisfaction) of 56% to 72% thanks to BestFit. We also helped to increase policy renewals by 7.5 percent.

What use cases for insurers is your program intended for?

On the one hand, in the HR area for their own employees to create dream teams. On the other hand, to make agents more efficient or the program is used for research. However, one of the most popular use cases is marketing: acquiring new customers, selling additional insurance and renewing policies.

Which Swiss insurers do you work with?

As I said, with the Zurich Insurance Group. We prefer to work intensively with one group and can give them a competitive advantage with BestFit. If we worked with competitors in the same country, it would eliminate this advantage.

What information should you collect about customers?

Up to now, when someone takes out travel insurance, for example, they won’t tell the insurer that they want to go skydiving on their vacation. What you would therefore also need to collect is the information that we specialize in.

What do you mean by „emotional DNA“?

Normal DNA is information about the body. BestFit is a reflection of the soul or the brain, i.e. it is the psychological and not the physical DNA. Since every company wants to measure different things, a lot of academic work is required on our part.

Almost too good to be true: Best Fit promises to make people happier, help companies make more money and improve the relationship between customers and companies.

We can promise this because our platform has been tested by WPP, one of the world’s largest agencies. People were asked whether BestFit’s assessment of them was accurate. On average, the people who recognized themselves were between 78 and 97 percent. 31 percent of people said they were surprised, but believed the assessment was correct. In addition, Gartner Research conducted due diligence on our platform for 10 months. Ultimately, our customers are very satisfied with our work.

In 2020, Gartner Research recognized us twice as a Cool Vendor in Insurtech, once for Commercial Applications and once for Health Applications.

You travel a lot and are on the road in Switzerland, Austria, Italy and the USA. Where do you prefer to be?

Always wherever I happen to be.

Sonja Kohn, a multidisciplinary entrepreneur, is the founder of BestFit, a behavioral science-based generative AI platform that has proven to be a leader in digital personalization technology. Winner of multiple industry awards, it integrates Nobel Prize-winning insights to reveal the intricacies of personality and decision-making processes. BestFit’s proprietary algorithms provide unprecedented hyper-personalization capabilities that enable businesses and governments worldwide to exceed their strategic goals by understanding and engaging their audiences on a deeply individual level.

With her visionary approach to identifying and exploiting market opportunities, she founded successful businesses with UniCredit Bank Austria and, as a pioneer of digitalization, with Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest bank. As an advisor to the Vienna Stock Exchange and the Austrian Ministry of Economics, she initiated cooperation with the stock exchanges in Dubai and Shanghai and was awarded the Grand Medal of Honor by the Austrian government for her achievements.

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