(Image credit: Richard Clark/Unsplash.)
No matter how you define a household, or a customer, home is where you should feel safe. Modern insurance carriers are creating safer spaces with proactive predict and prevent personalized products and services where being connected means being protected—and that’s good for the policyholder, the carrier and their relationship.
At home, office, on the road, and anywhere in between, staying connected is offering a neighborhood effect to the world around us where knowing what safe means includes understanding what is just around the corner, for us and our households and neighbors near and far.
Feeling safe includes the “now” and the “next,” where not only the current state of awareness can verify that everything is okay, but that imminent or unexpected changes can trigger alerts and improve your readiness and as needed resilience. Today, you don’t even need to be present at home to monitor that location, same with your vehicles, businesses, family members, friends, and other people, places, pets, services, and things that matter to you—being connected and continuously situationally aware helps us all feel more safe, informed, and gives us peace of mind. Sharing this same information with insurance carriers wraps it all together so that financial risk transfer is continuously available and adequate to the world around us.
While the risks around a home, like heatwave, wildfire, storm, sea-rise, convective deluge, flood, wind, blizzard, ice storm, fog, tornado, hurricane, even earthquake, may be unavoidable in a time of climatic and weather realities, the risk within a home, and particularly inside of a car and with each other, are much more actionable. Savvy insurance carriers are adapting to broadscale changes in perils at the environmental level, but they need to partner with consumers and businesses for sharing data and for optimizing safety and prevention best practices. No one wants a loss or injury, after all.
Consumers and companies are now engaging in a continuous exchange of current status and condition of risk information with more connectedness and with more distinctive value generation than ever before.
Sometimes the “little things” like active weather updates can keep you out of harm’s way as a lightning storm is in close-proximity, or even moving in your direction. Icy road condition updates and blizzard alerts can keep people at home instead of being stranded at school, work, or just out doing errands.
Physical things like monitors for moisture, smoke, heat, cold, electrical spikes, waterflow, physical motion, even Wifi/Bluetooth connectivity can individually and collectively fuse data and context to continuously understand what is happening at a location/building and present a situational awareness report around the clock—even telling habitation and use of a home, office, or area.
And don’t forget the plain old traffic pattern and road use updates that are now embedded in everything from route news to travel times and update sharing for meetups and pickups. Add to this the global advancements in telematics and usage based insurance offerings and you can see how home, car, and even life and health risks can each add context into safer homes, roads, drivers, and neighborhoods.
When sudden and unexpected events happen, mere microsensor noticed events can be interpreted as crashes or falls and then cellular technologies and/or IoT technologies (on cars, watches, tags, necklaces, pins, fobs, badges, and most often phones) can both create alerts to first responders as well as serve as location beacons on where specifically to send help—the newest forms of E-911 may even indicate the expected floor in a high-rise building.
Smarter, Better, Embedded, and Accurate Risk-to-Rate Solutions
If a false alarm, a quick and empathetic outreach can confirm everything is okay. If not a false alarm, your emergency contacts and others may be immediately informed. To a large degree, a safety network is now an ambient feature of daily living. While you may not think of that as being safer for yourself, knowing that you would know if a loved one, even a pet, was in crisis is certainly a comforting thought. Clever uses of continuous connection information which also include context of events and household situations are creating smarter, better, embedded, and accurate risk-to-rate solutions for any household risk transfer situation. It is making us better neighbors with safer neighborhoods too in many cases. Kids, grandkids, grandparents, and their extended communities are now all connectable, even with mundane things like tonight’s homework assignment or tomorrow’s event calendars. We can be actively routed around the least safe areas from any form of peril.
New sensor platforms and layers of data fused analytics are creating breakthrough abilities to know what is going on around us and plan for changes. Data and analytics are constantly adding context to interpret changes as good or not and we are learning to adapt to conditions including adding more inputs from ambient and curated devices. These evolving platforms with unified and harmonized understandings of safety and security create connected neighborhoods and cities while including all the people, places, and things with in them.
It’s not as futuristic as it may sound; the infrastructure is ahead of the use cases, but these use cases for continuous underwriting and operational risk management are as near as your smartphone, smart home, and smart car. Carriers should meet the many connected (and connectable) customers and businesses in the IoT sphere to make a safer tomorrow today.
Business and Technology Trends for Property/Casualty MGAs in 2023