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06 May 2010

There are some large scale events that no insurer can truly plan for: flash floods, arson or sabotage, terrorist attacks and, of course, accidents can have a devastating effect upon many people at the same time

Indeed, during all of these events, simply being able to deal with the sheer volume of contact received from the general public is a challenge in itself, requiring claims teams to man the phone lines adequately and keep the public fully informed.
Lower exposure, better customer service
RSA, however, has already seen the power of ESRI UK's GIS tools to help deal with large scale claims events – the first time was following the explosion at the Buncefield oil storage terminal in 2006. This was the largest explosion in Europe since the Second World War. "This was clearly a major incident in the UK insurance market," says Graham Heale, Property Portfolio Director at RSA. "I knew that by Monday, 9am, I would be faced with the inevitable question 'how much is this going to cost?'" However, Graham and his team were able to prepare rapidly. That's not the only impressive feat.
"Following seven months of actual physical assessment of the damage and loss adjustment, the number that we gave is still within seven per cent of the final cost," Graham affirms. Since that event, Graham and his team have used the same capability to support customers during the recent floods.
"Because the GIS system helped us to gear up quickly, we were able to send an emergency response vehicle to the scene within a couple of hours, with some of our experts on board to help everyone in the local area – not just our customers – with their insurance queries. "Clearly, this has benefits in terms of our level of service."
Greater accuracy, greater competitive edge
Taking advantage of the positional accuracy enabled by ESRI UK's solution, RSA is now in a position to assess risks much more effectively. "Our ability to assess individual risks such as arson, flood and so forth is much stronger; we can now price those risks much more accurately." explains Graham. "The more accurate risk assessment enabled by ESRI UK's system might actually enable us to attract business that our competitors may be pricing higher than us – purely because they cannot verify the specific location of the risk. Properties that, for example, are in a postcode area which flooded in the past, may not have actually been affected by that flood themselves. Our system can identify those customers and enables us to offer an appropriate premium that takes into account the risks at that specific location."
The future
ESRI UK GIS technology has been used by the team at RSA for many years; but as Graham explains, there are plans to do much more. "We've been using ESRI UK technology to measure a location's proximity to perils for some time. But the long term plan is to integrate this capability into a much more comprehensive, end-to end location-based system that will underpin a great deal of activity within the business."