Mapflow, the Dublin-based developer of location-based services, has completed a contract with a commercial underwriting firm in the UK said to be worth €250,000.
St Paul Travelers has implemented Mapflow’s RiskView offering for the insurance element of its underwriting business. In the UK, the company provides property-casualty insurance for certain industrial, professional and institutional sectors.
The firm will use RiskView to get a building-level assessment of the risk associated with a property across multiple peril categories. The software is supplied as a service that Mapflow said would allow St Paul Travelers to assess the risk at an individual property level, rather than the wider area as in traditional software models.
RiskView is part of Mapflow’s suite for the insurance sector, providing underwriters with online tools required to make accurate, fast decisions on whether to write policies, and at what rate, by offering real-time identification of peril level risk for an individual property.
According to Roy Hesketh, commercial underwriting systems development manager with St Paul Travelers, it was important to improve the accuracy of the firm’s property underwriting profitability by being able to make a thorough assessment of natural perils, notably subsidence and flood.
“We believe that the most cost-effective way to achieve this is through Mapflow’s online risk mapping service which removes the need for us to invest in expensive software and data, while providing up-to-date information when and where we need it,” Hesketh added.
“The ability for insurers to assess risk at building level is now on the agenda of every commercial insurer in the UK,” added Mapflow CEO Richard Bryce. He went on to claim that a service-based software model offers faster benefits to customers as it doesn’t carry the expense and implementation risk that is sometimes associated with traditional enterprise software licensing and data acquisition models.
By Gordon Smith
