AXA Climate & Hailios to expand access to parametric hail insurance

AXA Climate, the parametric specialist risk transfer managing general agent (MGA) unit of global insurance and reinsurance company AXA, has partnered with Hailios, a company that leverages technology and sensors to help close gaps in hail protection.

The goal of the partnership is to expand access to parametric hail insurance to more locations around the world.

Hail has become one of the most damaging weather perils, both in the United States and other regions of the world such as Europe and Australia.

It’s a peril where losses faced by the insurance and reinsurance industry have been expanding, as more severe and large hail events are reported in regions where economic activity and exposure levels have been rising very quickly.

With so much more value at-risk to large hail storms, the need for better insurance products to protect against localised hail damage is clear.

Hailios provides precision climate data on hail events, using its compact, wireless hail detection and analysis system.

AXA Climate launched its parametric hail insurance product back in 2019 and has been steadily improving and growing its parametric hail offering ever since.

Thanks to success in North America, MGA AXA Climate is now expanding its parametric hail insurance offering to other markets such as France and Australia.

Hailios has been a key partner helping to make this expansion happen.

Hailios’ Eyewitness ground hail sensor has delivered an improvement in the quality and reliability of hail data, making for a better input to parametric triggers for risk transfer arrangements.

Eyewitness is a 7kg, solar-powered sensor that can be simply installed at ground-level, to capture comprehensive weather data, including details of hail events.

Hailios has also developed a product called Scoop, which is a centralised dashboard that provides 24/7 remote-access to monitor and manage all data sets collected by Eyewitness.

Using radar and other historical data as well, AXA Climate and its partners use the data and dashboard to receive an event report for every storm, while monitoring assets remotely and in real-time.

AXA Climate’s Hail Protection product means that when an insured is hit with hail, Hailios can record and report the characteristics of the storm, with that report providing the reference to determine whether a parametric contract has been triggered or not and whether the insured is eligible for a payout.

“Hailios offers a simple and sophisticated solution for capturing the nuanced data AXA Climate needs to expand our parametric hail product into new regions. We also see the potential to develop new offers with Hailios given their ability to record a range of weather variables,” explained Mia Vioulès, a senior underwriter at AXA Climate.

Lucas Schiff, Co-founder and CEO of Hailios added, “Hailios provides site specific data through the combination of its autonomous ground-level sensors, radar and satellite data. Our Eyewitness sensor platform is one-of-a-kind with its low-cost scalability and works in over 130 countries.”