The general insurances, market, data, analytics and technology are helping commercial property insurance providers make fast and more accurate decisions. They help to make an immediate sense of huge and growing volume of data at the market’s disposal. This data includes the characteristics of a property (floors, height, roof type etc.); its location; the individuals behind the business; the crime and environmental risks including near real-time data on flood and river flows direct from the Environment Agency plus customer and policy data held within an insurance providers’ own databases. All this data can be analysed, aggregated and visualised.
The demand for this level of insight is only set to grow as commercial insurance providers face changing risks on two fronts. The first is climate change and the cost of claims emanating from extreme weather events. The second is the shift in the use of commercial property space, partially caused by the pandemic. When a weather event occurs, insurance providers can look at a specific geographical region, a postcode, an address or a single property outline, pulling on a wide range of data including live feeds from the Environment Agency. The flexibility of the tools offered today makes it easy to filter down to the risks most of interest, focus on one property for underwriting purposes or a whole block of properties in the path of a coming storm. The use of ‘live’ data also means that Estimated Maximum Loss and Potential Maximum Loss can be calculated.
