Beazley takes its parametric Weather Guard product online

London headquartered insurance and reinsurance firm Beazley continues to enhance its parametric weather insurance offering, now entering into a partnership with Paragon Insurance Holdings to combine its underwriting with an online technology solution.

Beazley’s Weather Guard product is one of the better known parametric weather insurance offerings in the marketplace.

The Weather Guard product is designed for event organisers, retailers and the like, but the re/insurer also sells parametric weather protection to other types of clients.

Previously, Beazley had enhanced the parametric offering with technology to enable automated payouts, speeding the claims process for buyers of this parametric weather insurance protection.

Now, Beazley has launched an online portal, created in partnership with Paragon, to provide faster service, with no change to the actual quality of parametric insurance protection, limits or specific weather perils.

Weather Guard will continue to be written on Beazley’s admitted paper and Weather Guard claims will still be handled by its claims team.

Andrew Duxbury, Head of Contingency at Beazley explained, “Weather Guard is a market leading weather insurance product, leveraging Beazley’s comprehensive historical weather data and experience going back nearly 40 years and backed with outstanding underwriting expertise; it offers excellent protection against extreme weather events to businesses across the United States.

“The new online portal will ensure that more brokers are able to easily access Weather Guard using high-quality, cutting-edge technology for speedy, frictionless turnaround times. I’m looking forward to working with Paragon as we continue to build Weather Guard together.”

Christian Phillips, President of Contingency Practices of Paragon, added, “WeatherGuard, a product I’ve underwritten for 9 years, plays an important role in protecting North American businesses from weather related losses and Paragon is excited to be helping bring it to an ever-wider audience, via state-of-the-art digital distribution tools.”

Through simplification and the use of technology, Beazley continues to make its parametric weather insurance offering more accessible to brokers and clients, which can only help to increase its uptake.

It’s still some way short of fully-automated, but Beazley continues to take steps that suggest the company has an ambition to put out insurance and reinsurance capacity linked to parametric triggers in an increasingly innovative way.