Hiscox has partnered Bellwether, a team at X, Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory, to introduce a new approach to wildfire modelling for the Californian insurance market.
The collaboration involves Hiscox London Market’s Property division working with Bellwether to incorporate its AI-powered wildfire model into existing risk scoring and modelling processes, seeking to improve risk selection and pricing for insurance products.
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The new model is already providing additional insurance options for homeowners in California.
Bellwether’s tool analyses extensive data to estimate wildfire risk, incorporating historical environmental information and various risk drivers.
The company claims that Bellwether has been designed to forecast wildfire risk up to five years ahead.
It will enable Hiscox to offer sustainable insurance solutions tailored to the evolving risk landscape.
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By GlobalDataThe model generates absolute wildfire risk scores, providing transparency regarding the factors contributing to each score.
Hiscox London market’s property divisional director James Brady stated: “This partnership allows us to integrate the very latest AI-powered modelling from Bellwether, with other third-party models and our own advanced risk modelling framework.
“It’s a powerful combination that can support a much more sustainable insurance solution for Californian homeowners. With this world-class, multi-model approach, we can quantify an insured’s exposure to wildfire risk with more precision, which in turn enables us to offer Hiscox capacity to a wider range of customers.”
Sarah Russell from Bellwether added: “Bellwether leverages the best of Google’s geospatial knowledge and AI technology to help companies and communities adapt better to the changing landscape of severe weather events like wildfire. We are excited to be working with Hiscox to show how Bellwether can help provide additional measurement, analysis and predictions for this dynamic risk and, in turn, assist in the availability and sustainable provision of wildfire insurance for Californian homeowners.”
