The Risks of Hazard

Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting representatives from three Lloyd’s syndicates for the first time. It was an exciting time for me and my product (InsitePro™), because Lloyd’s is always a milestone for any new product serving insurance. The real beauty of the meetings, though, was that they were not in the City of London, but rather, in a small American prairie city.

The Lloyd’s market is an icon of insurance, with its vast history, its innovative approach to risk management, and its global reach. To many people, Lloyd’s of London IS insurance. I always thought, though, that my first meetings with a Lloyd’s syndicate would be in London at their famous headquarters. Nope.

Last week I wrote about the Protection Gap and how insurers should be serving it. The post has been a huge success, mostly because it features Hemant Shah, CEO of RMS (thank you Mr. Shah!). The article pivoted on the question “What risk is the insurance industry not ready to handle?” and Mr. Shah’s response:

“I worry more about the risks the insurance industry is not covering right now.”

As I have studied underwriting natural catastrophe, one of the more interesting things I’ve learned is that it’s widely done with software built for something else: accumulation. Even though many accumulation solutions (including some cat models) offer an underwriting function, it is not suited to the actual task of underwriting.

Last week I took a look at the Top 5 Risks of Hazard articles from 2015. Today, here is a look at the Top 5 Accomplishments of InsitePro^™, the risk assessment software we are building here when not writing blog posts.

5. API connectivity. Insurance software is slowly but surely moving towards interconnectivity between disparate systems and software packages. Not everything is in the cloud (yet), but almost all insurance systems are able to integrate analytics and datasets. InsitePro fits this type of environment with its full suite of APIs and web services, plus it is based in the cloud and waiting for the industry to realize the benefits there.

Today is a big day for Intermap and for InsitePro — we are releasing FloodScope™ USA, the only flood model available that is built on a contiguous, manually-edited digital terrain model (DTM) for the lower 48 states and Hawaii.

As I've discussed before, elevation data is a key input into any flood model, so the ability to leverage a high quality DTM at full resolution is a significant achievement. Starting today, insurers can use flood zone determinations as a part of their analytics to better understand the risk of river flooding.