News
Allianz continues to expand automatic accident detection / Uncomplicated activation in the My Allianz app / Direct support for customers at the scene of the accident
[Translated by Google]
Immediate help in the event of a claim: With the Allianz accident detector
Allianz offers a digital claim service that supports customers still at the scene of the accident and ensures simple and transparent claims processing from the first moment. With his help, accidents in the car are automatically detected and forwarded to the claims experts of the alliance. After the notification, contact is made directly with the customers in order to discuss the first steps of claims settlement together with them and to support them in the unfamiliar situation.
Allianz accident detector: Simply register in the My Allianz app Until now, Allianz's digital claims service was only available for individual customer segments: Since July 2021, the service has been integrated into the telematics module BonusDrive, from October 2022 it also started for drivers of connected vehicles.
"With the Allianz accident detector, we keep our promise: We are there for our customers and help - at any place and at any time," says Lucie Bakker, claims chairman of Allianz Versicherungs-AG. The accident reporter supports directly and easily in the event of a claim. With our service and our help, we are directly supported by all customers who use the accident detector in the situation."
All car customers who use the Allianz customer portal My Allianz can now make use of the service via the associated app.
All you need to do is register for the My Allianz customer portal and then activate the service in the My Allianz app on your smartphone. Easy use and uniform service quality on all access routes
A particular advantage for customers is that no external sensors have to be installed in the vehicle to use the accident detector via the app. Also, the vehicle does not have to meet any structural requirements - as when used via installed sensors. The service relies on the sensors installed in smartphones and is therefore based on state-of-the-art technologies.
Allianz offers different access routes to the accident detector in order to make its service available to even more customers. Whichever innovative solution they choose: In any case, the Allianz accident detector guarantees high service quality, data security and support in the event of damage.
Dr Lucie Bakker, Allianz Chief Claim Officer and Member of the Board
Dr. Melanie Berggold. Allianz Germany AG
NHTSA planning to require automatic emergency braking on new vehicles
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the top federal roadway safety agency, proposed a rule Wednesday to require all new vehicles to include automatic emergency brakes.
The agency said in a release Wednesday that the proposed rule would “dramatically” reduce the number of crashes with pedestrians and rear-end collisions. It projects that the rule would save 360 lives and reduce injuries by 24,000 every year.
“Today, we take an important step forward to save lives and make our roadways safer for all Americans,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in the release. “Just as lifesaving innovations from previous generations like seat belts and air bags have helped improve safety, requiring automatic emergency braking on cars and trucks would keep all of us safer on our roads.”
The Transportation Department (DOT) argues that the rule would prevent many crashes from occurring at all and make those that happen less destructive.
The rule is part of the department’s National Roadway Safety Strategy, which the administration launched in January 2022 to address traffic fatalities and injuries.
Why Embedded Insurance is the Hottest Trend Right Now?
The insurance industry has been evolving rapidly over the years, with new trends emerging to meet the changing needs of customers. One of the latest trends in the industry is embedded insurance, which is an innovative way to integrate insurance products or services into non-insurance platforms.
Dogan Kaleli, CEO at Stere, Founder at Nion, Ex-Allianz, LinkedIn Creator
Property-cat rates up 33%, index hits record high at June 1: Howden Tiger
Howden Tiger reports a significant increase in reinsurance rates, with risk-adjusted property-catastrophe pricing up 33% on average at June 1 renewals, reaching its highest level since inception.
The rate increase fell within the range of 25% to 40%, with variations depending on the specific layer. This follows a 25% increase in rates observed in 2022, bringing the index to its highest level since its establishment.
The rise in pricing was driven by persistent low levels of capital relative to risk, along with a combination of global and local pressures. Hurricane Ian had a significant impact on losses for insurers, leading to varying effects on rates.
Allstate stops issuing new homeowners insurance policies in California | Insurance Business America
Allstate has joined other major insurers with its decision to stop issuing new homeowners insurance policies in California.
Responding to inquiries from the San Francisco Chronicle, Allstate spokesperson Brittany Nash said the decision was driven by the escalating costs associated with insuring properties in the state.
“The cost to insure new home customers in California is far higher than the price they would pay for policies due to wildfires, higher costs for repairing homes, and higher reinsurance premiums,” Nash said, adding that Allstate is unable to quickly adjust prices due to state regulations.
Allstate’s pause in writing new policies began last year, according to the Chronicle, but the decision went largely unnoticed until a similar move by State Farm prompted a closer look at California’s property insurance market.
Update: Lloyd’s, Tokio Marine Join Defectors From Climate Group
Tokio Marine Holdings Inc., Japan’s largest insurer by market value, is withdrawing from the Net Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA), the latest in a wave of defections from the world’s biggest climate alliance for insurers.
The company declined to give a reason for its withdrawal. A spokesperson said Tokio Marine will continue to consider measures to realize a decarbonized society such as the use of renewable energy and emphasized it will keep a close eye on social and environmental causes.
Allianz SE, AXA SA and Lloyd’s of London left the NZIA last week, following earlier defections by several founding members including Munich Re. The alliance is a sub-group of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, known as GFANZ, a coalition of global financial institutions “committed to accelerating the decarbonization of the economy.”
Why P&C is starting to use geospatial-based hazard ratings
The P&C insurance industry's combined ratio rose from 99.5% in 2021 to an estimated 105.6% in 2022, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
Many insurers have struggled to maintain profitability, and as such, they must seek improved methods to evaluate, underwrite, and price risk.
The increasing losses can be attributed, in part, to the frequency and intensity of significant natural disasters, as well as the population's migration to regions that are more prone to catastrophes. The decline is also due to the insufficient availability of precise and detailed information concerning potential risks and the exposure to loss at each insured location.
Pricing by territory is insufficient
Underlying the challenge – and the need for change – is the fact that typical territory definitions and ratemaking methods are insufficient and inefficient. Insurers have the arduous task of balancing the need to create territories large enough to be credible from a statistical perspective – yet small enough to represent homogeneous regions where exposure to loss is relatively uniform.
While traditional territory ratemaking has been utilized by actuaries for several decades, it presents significant difficulties for product managers, underwriters, actuaries, and IT teams. The primary issue is that most all risks are not correlated with zip codes or municipal boundaries. Historical territory definitions are simply not sufficiently correlated with the propensity for loss.
Tammy Nichols Schwartz, Senior Director Of Data And Analytics, Guidewire
CoreLogic issues 2023 Atlantic hurricane risk analysis
CoreLogic Inc. said Thursday that more than 33 million U.S. properties are at risk of hurricane-force wind damage and that there is $11.6 trillion of total reconstruction cost value at risk nationally for the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season.
The CoreLogic analysis includes risks for more than 32 million single-family residences and 1 million multifamily residences along the U.S. Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast, according to a company statement.
CoreLogic has identified that such residences are at moderate or more significant risk of sustaining damage from hurricane-force winds for the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season. This damage would have a combined reconstruction cost value of $11.6 trillion, according to the study.
The report also focused on metropolitan areas including New York. More than 4.3 million single and multi-family residences in the New York City metro area are at risk of hurricane-force winds and equate to a reconstruction cost value of $2.4 trillion at risk, CoreLogic said.
Commentary/Opinion
Crash Detection: Connecting the Dots Reveals the Future
Over the past year several seemingly unrelated announcements involving crash detection have surfaced. Taken alone, none of them would necessarily lead industry participants to identify a trend. But taken together and understood in the context of the new and rapidly changing environment in which we live and work, they reveal a dramatically different future for driver and personal safety as well as the auto claims and insurance process and experience.
- CCC and Sfara announce partnership for crash detection and claims STP
- Reuters Events. Connected Claims USA Conference 2022 featured a Plenary Panel discussion on “Connected Claims in the Cloud: First Notice of Incident (FNOI) becomes On-Ramp to the Digital Claims Highway”.
- Panelists included Brad Metzger, Strategy Director, American Family, Nino Tarantino, GM of Insurance, Sfara, Joe Armeni, VP Telematics Business Development, CCC Intelligent Solutions, Marlene Dailey, Director, National Insurance Consulting Claims Practice Lead, RSM US LLP and moderator Stephen Applebaum, Managing Partner, Insurance Solutions Group
- CCC announces Zendrive partnership; Zendrive Joins CCC Network to offer insurers instant mobile crash detection data
- Rapidly changing carparc features a doubling of EV penetration and proliferation of ADAS features; all driving up average repair costs by over 50%
- eDriving unveils Solera Mentor crash detection powered by Sfara for commercial fleets
- Inflation hits insurance and collision repair industry; Insurer loss ratios deteriorate to 108; auto premiums rise 14%
- Rising auto insurance costs increases consumer shopping; carriers seek differentiators, including UBI, PAYD and driver safety programs of various kinds
- A number of Telematics and Mobile service providers begin to reference and offer “crash detection” in conjunction with driver safety and/or auto insurance claims, including Arity, Life360, Sentiance and Cambridge Mobile Telematics
- Apple and Google announce crash detection on newer models and Apple iPhone, Apple Watch and Google Pixel and Android phones; plagued with false positive problems they have followed up with improvements to the technology to address complaints.
- Progressive announces Accident Response available to all policyholders, not just those in UBI programs
- NVDIA announces AI speeds insurance claims estimates from CCC Intelligent Solutions for better policyholder experiences
- Sfara expands emergency service capabilities to nearly 40% of the world’s population
- Allianz announces expansion of Accident Detection in the My Allianz app for use by all customers from the scene of an accident
Until recently, crash detection has been narrowly offered through insurer UBI programs or more broadly as emergency assistance as spotlighted with Apple’s devices, despite its flaws. In these instances, only severe crashes are accurately detected which represents a much smaller percentage of accidents while more than 70% of insurance claims are considered minor to moderate damages and/or injuries. Insurers like Progressive and now Allianz are beginning to offer crash detection to all drivers and competitors are likely to follow suit, sharply driving up adoption. However, the single greatest game-changer is highly accurate, smartphone-based low and higher speed accident detection. This means that annoying and costly false positive alerts will be suppressed.
The auto insurance industry will never return to its pre-pandemic state and will continue to face growing competitive challenges and continuing changes in consumer behavior and the automotive and transportation landscape, all driven by relentless advances in technology. Telematics will evolve from being a novelty used for pricing and marketing, adopted by only a small fraction of all policyholders to represent an enterprise wide set of solutions that will usher in a new and better age for auto insurance, impacting the majority of policyholders.
Specifically, real-time crash detection integrated with AI-enabled claims process management platforms will dramatically improve outcomes for auto carriers and claimants.
InsurTech/M&A/Finance/Collaboration
Hippo Announces Completion of $110M Debut Catastrophe Bond
Spinnaker Insurance Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hippo Holdings Inc. (NYSE: HIPO), today announced the successful sponsorship of Mountain Re Ltd. Series 2023-1 catastrophe bond. The $110 million cat bond is a 10% upsize from the initial $100 million transaction target.
As part of the transaction, Spinnaker is entering into a reinsurance contract with Mountain Re that offers protection against a variety of perils, including named storms, fire following an earthquake, severe thunderstorms, and winter storms, and provides Spinnaker with diversification of risk transfer capacity and access to capital markets.
“The successful sponsorship of our debut catastrophe bond demonstrates our maturation as a company. It is the direct result of our geographic diversification efforts and will serve as an integral part of our reinsurance program,” said Hippo President and CEO Rick McCathron. “Mountain Re is a multi-year, capital-markets-backed source of reinsurance that provides reinsurance coverage against catastrophic events for Hippo Insurance Service’s homeowners products underwritten by Spinnaker.”
“Current market conditions require creative risk transfer structures like the one provided by Mountain Re,” said Shiv Kumar, President of GC Securities. “We’re very pleased to support Spinnaker as it delivers innovative insurance solutions and access to the reinsurance market to MGA, program administration and insurtech companies.”
Ledgebrook Goes Live With Socotra Connected Core Targeting the Underserved Wholesale Broker Market
Socotra, the next-generation core platform provider for modern insurers, together with Ledgebrook, an InsurTech MGA focused on the excess and surplus (E&S) market, today announced the launch of Ledgebrook’s new platform, powered by Socotra Connected Core.
“We are excited to see Ledgebrook leverage the capabilities of Connected Core and App Marketplace to bring their new products to market more rapidly and enhance their customer experience” said Dan Woods, founder and CEO of Socotra.
The end-to-end platform empowers Ledgebrook to redefine speed and service in the US wholesale broker market by offering a faster and simpler quoting experience, as well as best-in-class pricing and risk selection while streamlining operations, enhancing customer experiences, and accelerating new product launches.
Ledgebrook, a Boston-based InsurTech MGA founded in March 2022, set out to introduce the powerful combination of cutting-edge technology and deep insurance expertise in the E&S space, with the goal of delivering a best-in-class experience to the previously underserved wholesale broker community.
AI in Insurance
Generative AI is Coming for Insurance
Because underwriting, selling, and servicing rely so heavily on humans processing large quantities of written or verbal communication, existing tools have struggled to properly automate these services and materially impact loss ratios (losses on written premiums) and expense ratios (underwriting and servicing written premiums). Large language models (LLMs), with their ability to proficiently collect and distill large amounts of data, could change this as they can augment or fully replace the process of a human combing through large amounts of data.
While current machine learning technology allows for improved decisioning on simple products like auto and home insurance, more complex underwriting processes like commercial and life insurance remain challenging. This has less to do with the process of decisioning relevant data and more to do with collecting and synthesizing the relevant data. While traditional ML models have helped dramatically improve more standardized underwriting processes like home and auto, LLMs could potentially help with the more complex group by gathering data to help underwriters make better decisions, especially in more intricate cases like large commercial policies where more context and follow-up questions are required.
For example, most large commercial policies cover dozens or more locations, and each location has specific nuances (such as electrical panels, fire doors, sprinkler density/effectiveness, management effectiveness, amount of combustible storage) that must be gathered from the applicant, understood by the underwriter, and evaluated against underwriting guidelines. LLM-powered workflow software for underwriters could drive down underwriting time and cost while increasing accuracy.
Seema Amble, a16z fintech partner, Andreessen Horowitz - May 2023 Fintech Newsletter
Capgemini and Google Cloud Launch Global Generative AI Center of Excellence to Drive Innovation
Capgemini and Google Cloud have announced a significant expansion of their long-standing strategic partnership in data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).
The expanded partnership between aims to accelerate client transformation with generative AI and will see the establishment of a global Generative AI Google Cloud Center of Excellence (CoE), enabling enterprises to unlock the full potential of AI technologies.
The new CoE will play a vital role in helping clients achieve their business transformation goals, enhance customer engagement, and accelerate value creation from AI investments. Capgemini’s extensive community of over 65,000 professionals engaged with Google Cloud will benefit from the partnership by gaining advanced generative AI skills.
The collaboration capitalises on the convergence of Google Cloud’s generative AI technologies and Capgemini’s distinctive three-dimensional approach. Capgemini brings industry expertise, deep product and software engineering skills, and data science capabilities to assist clients throughout their entire AI journey, from ideation to value creation.
How AI Innovation could be used to Stop 100 Million Preventable Injuries in the Workplace
Josh Butler, CEO CompScience, examines the potential of AI to create a safer workplace and prevent environmental risk factors from impacting employee health
Global workplace safety has long been a critical concern for organisations worldwide, costing society over US$4 trillion annually. In recent years, advancements in technology, specifically in the fields of computer vision and data science, have provided leaders with unprecedented opportunities to achieve tangible environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals in the realm of workplace safety.
This convergence of technological capabilities like computer vision and social trends like safety culture has set the stage for a groundbreaking transformation in occupational safety. And now, new AI-powered MGA players in the $715 billion commercial property/casualty market can provide the financial incentives that drive necessary change, all while improving customer experiences and loss ratios.
Computer vision, a field that combines artificial intelligence and image processing techniques, has made significant strides in enhancing workplace safety. At the company where I work, we have demonstrably lowered the risk of injuries. By leveraging cameras and sensors, computer vision systems can detect potential hazards and unsafe practices. For instance, they can identify workers not wearing appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE), detect near misses by forklifts, and monitor ergonomics. This technology acts as a vigilant, non-intrusive observer, analysing and alerting workers and management to potential risks, thereby preventing accidents before they occur.
Aureus Analytics Helps The Hanover Insurance Group Extend DONNA to Select Agencies
Aureus Analytics, a global artificial intelligence technology company that provides customer experience and data analytics solutions to the insurance industry announced that The Hanover Insurance Group will offer Aureus' DONNA platform to a select number of its independent agency partners.
DONNA is an Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics Platform for independent agents and brokers. DONNA helps independent agents to better serve their customers and enhance the value of their existing book of business.
The Hanover will offer DONNA to provide additional real-time data to agency partners that leverage The Hanover's Agency Insight capability. By providing agency members with deep and real-time insights into their customers, DONNA will help The Hanover's agents deliver a better experience to their policyholders.