Insurance Luminaries 2023 Risk Management Innovation Honorees
Honorees in this category find fresh, inventive ways to address insurer and insured risk. (Part 4 of 5)
This marks the third year that PropertyCasualty360 has highlighted P&C insurance professionals and organizations that are pushing for fresh thinking around some of the most pressing issues of our time. This year, Insurance Luminaries are recognized in five categories that reflect the state of the industry: Claims Innovation, Coverage Innovation, Risk Management Innovation, Technology Innovation, and Innovation in Workplace Culture.
Honorees in the category of Risk Management Innovation find fresh and inventive ways to address insurer and insured risks while fostering advanced thinking and action when it comes to risk-related communication and mitigation.
AF Group Work Comp Modernization
Program
AF Group consistently strives to create value-added services for their customers. As part of their Loss Run/Risk Management Modernization program, they added two vital tools to help underwriters, agencies, and businesses to understand and manage their risk: Report Center and Loss Project Pricing Platform.
Report Center is a 24/7 data source for losses, claim details, and trends over time. This self-service tool helps agents and customers ensure that injured workers are taken care of while preventing future losses and keeping premiums down. This tool has proven very popular. In 2022, nearly 71,000 agents and 5,000 policyholders accessed the tool in 2022.
Loss Project Pricing Platform automates the entry of loss runs. This makes it easier to input the data and reduces the risk of error. By reducing the time necessary to input loss runs by more than 80%, this tool gives underwriters more time to focus on value-added services. https://www.afgroup.com/
Kirk Aguilera
Individual
Kirk Aguilera is an industry veteran with more than 30 years of experience in insurance. Aguilera realized that many businesses are dissatisfied with the coverage they receive and how insurers handle their claims. The most significant issue he identified was that many businesses lacked a proper understanding of the specific jurisdictional regulations that govern workers’ compensation programs. Together with Leidy Rivera, SVP, Aguilera developed a team to educate clients about key details related to workers’ compensation claims.
The program has been hugely successful, reducing the time required to close claims (75% to 80% of claims are closed in the year they occur), and reducing clients’ pure loss rate (PLR) by up to 35% in the first year. Despite the increased frequency of claims, the average severity rate has decreased by as much as half the cost of previous recorded claims. One client saw savings of $1.6 million within the first year after implementing the solutions developed by Aguilera’s team. https://www.libertycompany.com/
CAC Specialty Natural Resources Platform
Product
In January 2022, CAC Specialty launched a new product line to fill a noticeable omission in the insurance and risk management landscape for renewable energy companies. Many renewable energy project developers do not have in-house risk managers, and because they often sell projects prior to construction they don’t have brokers considering the insurance needs of projects.
The Cirrus consulting platform provides renewable energy projects with analytics, modeling, risk mitigation, and insurance market intelligence tools to better inform critical project and portfolio-level insurance and risk management decisions. The Cirrus team brings a holistic view to the development process that can’t be replicated by engineering, lender consulting, or natural catastrophe modeling offerings alone.
Cirrus has served 28 clients since inception, providing more than 90 reports and/or consulting engagements. These detailed reports can help clients make critical early-stage decisions. Sometimes these reports reveal insuring a project will be cost-prohibitive, but it can also help clients find insurance essential to bring projects to market.
https://cacspecialty.com/risk-insurance-solutions/natural-resources/
Ed Cooney
Individual
Ed Cooney works with several Joint Insurance Funds (JIFs) in New Jersey. These risk pools for public entities consist of nearly 1,000 members (towns, counties, fire, police, utilities, housing, etc.) representing nearly 70% of the state’s local governments. As these JIFs have seen nearly 200 cyber claims in the past few years, they, like many public entities, face rising cyber insurance costs. These JIFs may end up losing coverage because the costs become unbearable or because insurers stop offering coverage altogether.
As a solution, Cooney suggested the creation of a proprietary cyber insurance program and a full cybersecurity suite for membership. In 2022, Cooney and his team developed a cyber risk management program addressing security issues. The program launched in January 2023, and is the first and only of its kind for public entities. Implementing this program has helped members avoid rate increases. www.connerstrong.com
Corvus Risk Navigator
Product
Corvus’s all-in-one Corvus Risk Navigator is a pioneering global cyber underwriting platform.
Corvus’ underwriting, data science, cybersecurity, and tech teams collaborated to build the platform from the ground up. It arms underwriters with predictive data-driven insights to allow superior risk selection, accelerated decision-making, and IT security recommendations. Corvus Risk Navigator also improves workflow efficiencies including cyber-speed quote responsiveness, proactive and continuous risk calibration, algorithmic pricing, stronger broker relationships, and career acceleration.
With the Corvus Risk Navigator, productivity is up three times to grow books of business, while maintaining a leading loss ratio of 36%. As Corvus makes cyber insurance attainable for more organizations, the platform allows for rapid sharing of real-time cyber risk insights and vulnerability alerts with actionable remediations and quantified policy controls to increase cyber insurability. https://www.corvusinsurance.com/
Eox Vantage
Company
EOX Vantage amplifies the efficiency of companies, helping them to be more profitable and grow faster. The goal is to increase the efficiency of every department using two primary solutions. EOX Performance focuses on streamlining operations with a hybrid of business process outsourcing and technology. This solution creates new, hybrid solutions to reduce the outsourcing burden, integrate technology and build workflows that use the best of both. EOX Accelerate enables new opportunities for businesses to amplify growth and find profitability with software solutions customized for the needs of clients and their customers.
For one customer, EOX Vantage created a single unified platform for a centralized workflow. When implemented, this solution reduced data entry by 70%, turnaround time improved by 80%, processing time decreased by 99%, and operating costs dropped by 90%. https://www.eoxvantage.com/
InsureTEK, INC.
Company
InsureTEK, Inc. is a Loss Control as a Service (LCaaS) insurtech platform and ESG solution provider. Its end-to-end platform integrates all components of the water risk solution: the installation of building sensors in either new construction or old buildings, smart building monitoring, transmission of water data intelligence, insurance, and warranty underwriting. Utilizing a proprietary IoT “edged” machine learning platform InsureTEK offers underwriters immediate, continuous risk and loss control insight for the buildings they protect.
InsureTEK is a partnership of smart building experts, insurance, commercial real estate and finance veterans with national installation, telecommunications and underwriting capabilities. Focused exclusively on commercial real estate, InsureTEK installations are growing rapidly in multifamily, hospitality, retail, healthcare, schools, universities, military housing, office buildings and other commercial structures. Water leak detection typically begins immediately — these can be fixed to stop water waste and water damage. https://www.insuretek.com/
LexisNexis Risk Solutions Total Property Understanding
Product
Total Property Understanding provides a modern all-in-one solution to the inspection process that is changing the game for insurance carriers and property owners. An end-to-end, AI-enabled underwriting solution for the home insurance market, it helps US home carriers better manage and evaluate risk. Consumers use a self-guided survey tool to capture comprehensive interior and exterior data, which is combined with aerial imagery and other critical data insights in powerful predictive models. With this data, carriers can narrow in on the properties with the highest probable risk, dedicating resources to investigation, mitigation, and other strategies to minimize loss and maximize profitability.
The tool not only allows carriers to evaluate new business, but it also makes property review so efficient that it allows insurers to review their renewal books at scale. https://risk.lexisnexis.com/insurance/total-property-understanding
Kinetic and Nationwide
Safer Workplace Program
Program
Kinetic is the creator of a smart wearable device and software platform aimed at reducing workplace injuries and improving the lives of workers through improved ergonomics safety. Nationwide Ventures initially backed the company in 2016. Nationwide made additional investments over the years, and its E&S/Specialty division began working with Kinetic to group their technology-driven approach to worker safety with a workers’ compensation insurance product.
Kinetic is anchored around a wearable device that attaches to a wearer’s hip. This alerts the wearer of incorrect ergonomics, a leading cause of workplace-related musculoskeletal disorders and strain and sprain injuries. Although specific performance numbers for the program are confidential, workforces are experiencing reductions in injuries, shorter recovery times, and higher worker quality of life. The program has surpassed all its first-year goals and has created significant buzz around Kinetic’s IPO. https://kinetic-insurance.com/
ZestyAI
Company
ZestyAI provides climate and property risk analytics solutions powered by AI. The company uses aerial imagery, permit, transaction, weather, and IoT data — all analyzed by AI to turn more than 200 billion data points into comprehensive digital records and property-specific risk scores. These property risk scores are 10 times more accurate than incumbent models.
Carriers share these risk scores with their customers to educate them on the drivers of risk and specific actions that homeowners can take to lower their property’s risk. The result is transparency in pricing and empowering homeowners to take an active role in mitigating risk so they can lower their premiums. It improves profitability for carriers that can continue to select properties that meet their risk appetite, even in generally dangerous areas, and helps homeowners get insurance when less accurate models might incorrectly deem them uninsurable. The platform continues to evolve, adding a product to help insurers meet new regulatory requirements imposed by California law. https://zesty.ai/
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