Infoterra launches risk management service
Infoterra Ltd, a leader in the provision of geospatial products and services, has launched a new Managed Service solution to enhance business decision support for insurance professionals by delivering improved risk intelligence
Working with Infoterra, underwriters, loss adjusters and other insurance professionals will be able to combine their current and prospective property portfolios with a range of geospatial information and perils datasets. This will enable them to gain risk intelligence at an individual property level and to have a comprehensive geographical view of exposure in a given area.
By integrating a range of insurance perils datasets - including country-wide flood risks, subsidence, and Home Office crime statistics - with addressing, mapping, aerial photography and height data, Infoterra can provide insurers with risk-ratings in a geographical context. Location can be used to group risk from perils, as well as provide a common link across multiple internal datasets where connections were previously difficult to see. For example, there may be a clear correlation between motor theft and property vandalism claims in a given area.
Using the new Infoterra Managed Services, insurance firms can quickly take advantage of a scalable solution with answers delivered via a standard Web browser. The interface and business rules can be customised, giving a tailored solution without the cost and timescale associated with a bespoke development. Thanks to Infoterra's highly secure data hosting facility, insurance firms can receive dynamic quotation support - finding out, for example, whether a given property might be subject to flooding or subsidence - or work with Infoterra to obtain a regular analysis of their complete book. All the data maintenance and storage is managed by Infoterra, ensuring the latest data is always accessed and reducing operational overheads.
"By combining the latest perils datasets with our geospatial data we've created an extremely powerful decision support capability," commented Gill Dickson, Divisional Sales Manager, Insurance, for Infoterra Ltd. "Geospatial information provides the key to integrating and amalgamating diverse datasets, and helps insurers make a more informed judgement of risk prior to offering a new quotation or to analyse a complete portfolio in order to establish overall exposure."
"The ease-of-use and flexibility of our Managed Service approach means that business managers don't get distracted by the in-depth tools offered by GIS software, which are best suited to scenario modeling. Instead they gain immediate answers to key business questions such as, 'which of my insured properties are exposed to flood risks?' or 'what is the rebuild cost of all properties over two storeys in subsidence risk areas and on our books?'," continued Gill Dickson.
Using the sophistication of Infoterra's major £2 million geospatial hosting centre - Europe's largest dedicated commercial geospatial data facility - answers to this kind of question are available via the Web, and can be presented either as a simple risk-rating in tabular form, or in the form of calculations based on specific input data. Answers can also be offered within a geographic visualisation tool, so that concentrations of risk or clusters of related information can be easily recognised.
