AGILE Risk Partners aims to improve risk data with HERE Technologies partnership

AGILE Risk Partners, a specialist and technology focused direct & facultative (D&F) property risk underwriting start-up, has partnered with experienced mapping and data experts HERE Technologies as it seeks to improve the quality of risk data used in underwriting decision-making.

AGILE is a combination of broker and underwriter and is looking to advanced technological capabilities such as big data and analytics platforms to enhance its ability to write risk portfolios that deliver sustainable returns for insurance and reinsurance capital partners.

HERE Technologies is a leading location data and technology platform with decades of experience in key areas such as mapping, data cleansing and analytics.

AGILE and HERE are partnering with the goal of creating a solution for third-party brokers, insurance or reinsurance risk-carriers and clients through which they can access services for data cleaning asset schedules.

Richard Foster, AGILE’s Director of Underwriting explained, “HERE is assisting our ambitions to move our business further towards predictive analysis rather than reactionary. Our Industry needs to improve detail at the risk level before portfolio roll-up. Poor addressing and geocoding experience leads to a broken process. The critical error has to be eradicated from the risk assessment.

“HERE is the perfect partner to help us focus on the problems with the upstream source feed, the Meta Data. We have been reviewing the anomalies in the source data which has matched for example a provided co-ordinate for the location situated in the ocean, or located beyond miles from its real address, its true hazard, or found this point of interest belonging to a different Insured. Once the accuracy of the address line in the source data is complete we can tap into HEREs enormous data Ingesting Indexes for enrichment data to gather surrounding spatial insight for individual risk assessment and create HD scaling maps for portfolio deterministic.”

James Poole, AGILE’s Managing Director added, “The purpose of our business is to lead profound sustainable change in global re/insurance markets. One of the ways that we’re doing this is starting with the data, and this partnership represents a leap-forward in terms of data, although we’re looking at much more than just a data cleansing solution.

“HERE ingests 200bn probe points per month—be this from a phones, other IoT and telemetry devices—and they are already working with a number of leading Industry teams to improve their operational leverage, including driverless vehicles for the mining trades, live traffic updates, proximity to power line cables, fire brigade, water mains, address boundaries, access to buildings for Government prevention agencies, port blockage for Logistics firms to name a few.

“But taking things down to first principles, we think that the challenge for generating risk-adjusted returns on capital for our ILS, hedge fund and traditional risk capital provider-clients, is a data challenge. And we are arguing that value-creation in these contexts requires better, more accurate and complete data—focusing-in on the critical error!”

Jon Calverley, an insurance industry specialist at HERE Technologies also said, “Risk-data quality & veracity is a massive issue for professional re/insurers, and this is a significant blocker to effective underwriting, and to the credibility of the Natural Catastrophe modelling output. HERE is ranked as the world’s #1 location platform index with 30+ years of location experience and our involvement in the autonomous vehicle sector triggered the connection with the Agile team. They were looking for the number one cartographer to cleanse data for precise and accurate location intelligence.”

Chris Young, Senior Sales Manager, Here Technologies added, “The opportunity to partner with insurance industry experts to utilize HERE automotive and enterprise grade map to build a better precise and accurate data cleansing solution for the insurance industry is exciting.”

AGILE aims to help a diverse range of insurance and reinsurance capital providers, including investors and insurance-linked securities (ILS) funds, gain access to high-quality portfolios of D&F property, plus other risks.

The quality of data inputs used in modelling and underwriting decisions are key to the quality of risk portfolios created. Hence working to cleanse and improve data accuracy, as well as augmenting data using other sources that are available, can assist in improving the accuracy of underwriting decisions and pricing, ultimately driving better performing portfolios.

HERE and Agile Risk Partners will be hosting a webinar on the 13th October 2020, providing more detail and a demonstration of their proprietary data-cleansing solution.