IIT Kharagpur students win EXL Excellence Quotient 2019

Two teams from IIT Kharagpur swept 3 out of 4 awards at the final round of EXL Excellence Quotient 2019. Team Ninety Degrees of Anmol Thakkar & Ayush Bansal from IIT Kharagpur secured the 1st position and Team Tesseract of Ayush Patnaik & Prakhar Prakash secured 2nd position thereby bringing laurels to the Institute. 

EXL Excellence Quotient (EQ) is an annual case study contest structured to test skills like problem identification, logical thinking, structured and methodical approach and efficient analysis amongst its participants. Students from 20 premier academic institutes across the country including 8 IITs and 7 NITs participated in the competition. A total of 698 teams registered out of which 38 qualified through 1st Round and only 6 teams made it through the 2nd Round to the National Finals.

The challenge pertained to designing improved fraud detection methodologies & optimize the cost of the investigation in the insurance industry. They were asked to suggest ways to improve the fraud detection process in terms of accuracy as well as the time taken for the entire process. 

“Trust is an important aspect for an insurance company because it is selling a promise. Taking advantage of the holistic dataset provided in the competition, we gained insights into the entire value chain and created data features around metrics of trust,” explained Anmol Thakkar, a student from the IIT Kharagpur’s winning team. The insurance claims were then analysed using these metrics and fraudulent claims were identified. “We built an algorithm that supported all offerings that an insurance company has on its roadmap and presented fraud prevention methodologies like telematics plug, that can help a company turn around their revenue numbers,” he added. 

The winning team, Team Ninety Degrees from IIT Kharagpur received a cash prize of Rs. 1.25 Lakhs along with certificates and winning trophy. The runner ups, Team Tesseract from IIT Kharagpur received a cash prize of Rs. 60 thousand. Pre-placement offers were extended to the winning teams.

The case study contest provides participants platform to learn and experience real life consulting problems faced by organizations and how they can apply their academic learning and business acumen to offer solutions to such problems. EXL EQ 2019 offered participants an opportunity to engage in decision analytics using various data handling tools.