Oct 26, 2018
In today’s global economy, the definition of the workplace takes on a broader meaning, not being restricted to one specific location. Nevertheless, the risks of traveling, operating cross-border and insuring personnel and assets become a challenging affair in areas often changing rapidly due to conflict, health, political, or economic degradation. In these dynamic environments, measuring and predicting risk is more complex than ever. Given the geographic spread, insuring assets and travel across various regions has become an unpredictable proposition for insurance companies as returns are often hampered due to the opaque nature of specific locations.
Against this background, the main question that rattles every insurance and corporate organization is 'how do we enable instantaneous location-based assessment or risk intelligence?’. Equipped with the technology to improve an insurer’s efficiency, GeoSure brings forth solutions that systematically track, analyze, and forecast hyper-local risk environments in real-time. GeoSure’s solution provides statistical analysis along with scoring processes to obtain risk information pertaining to specific locations rated on a global standardized scale. “With the ability to pin hyper-local risk intelligence by GPS coordinates to very granular environments, a multitude of risks that exist both today and in the future can be measured, mitigated, and avoided altogether,” explains Michael Becker, CEO of GeoSure.
GeoSure’s.pioneering platform was developed to enhance insurance and travel economy organizations’ ability to gauge the relative vulnerability or risk associated with a location through a precise quantitative scoring system. Ranging from 1-100, with 1 being the safest or “least vulnerable,” and 100 the highest risk. The company’s GeoSafeScoresTM platform provides an accurate real-time risk rating of specific areas on a global coverage level. GeoSure provides data on over 30,000 localized environments, which includes neighborhoods of all the major cities around the world. The detailed reports are based on five main categories of risk that take into consideration physical harm, theft, political/basic freedoms, disease and medical, and a first of its kind women’s safety measure. The reports obtained by analyzing vast amounts of both structured and unstructured data then form a harmonic average for a summary of overall risk score. Equipped with such a scoring platform, insurance organizations can leverage a holistic representation of the risk environment to determine the necessity and amount of accident and health insurance, workplace violence, kidnap and ransom, travel and other specialty asset insurance coverage, as well as premium adjustment factors.
Organizations are provisioned with a quantification of risk associated with a region to make the right policy and premium adjustments before ratifying the travel plans of employees across borders, as well as assessing a company’s physical at-risk assets. GeoSure’s suite of safety awareness tools also provides the additional benefit for the insurer in the form of higher returns due to lower claims on the basis of more safety-conscious policyholders. Additionally, the application offers customization capabilities to insurers by incorporating innocuous but impactful personal user characteristic information.
“Our goal is not to frighten or alarm end users. We want to empower, inform, and engage them with instantaneous risk assessment at the most granular level in order to make optimal decisions through elevated safety consciousness,” states Daniel Madden, Chief Strategy Officer of GeoSure Global.
A key value proposition of GeoSure is its status as a massive data harvesting machine that utilizes hundreds of highly trusted data sources including the CDC, World Bank, UN, Interpol, WHO, and national, regional and local governments. The safety measuring system also utilizes crowdsourced reports on top of authorized data to create better scoring mechanisms as well as inculcate risk mitigation and safety consciousness. The insights gathered from analyzing the data incorporates information on local customs, literacy levels, real estate prices, inflation rates, political stability, economic conditions, access to medical facilities, and many other variables. The platform provides one of the most granular geo-location risk comparisons ever developed. Messaging the concept of “safety stewardship”, GeoSure offers its data via APIs on a subscription basis to B2B and B2B2C organizations and has tailored a premium mobile tool that is available to client organizations and their constituents.
The GeoSure team understands how risk and safety quantification is the main factor in insurance and premium adjustment scenarios, enabled by a sophisticated internal black box solution. The solution enables brokers to receive location-specific data into pricing tools that constantly calculates risk in real time. Behind the scenes, the calculation of the amount of premiums to be paid by the policyholder will depend on the geographic profile of the insured assets. In the end, the broker can design an optimal coverage for the policyholder, whether a family or organization. GeoSure’s data assists insurance companies to create different risk models and highlight potential areas of focus for deeper diligence and analysis.
To better understand the advantages of the platform, Becker explains that when a score of a particular area is changed, it is made visible across the platform globally. Additionally, the firm’s operational focus is worldwide. “We have a global footprint. We work with insurance organizations that are looking outside to the (ROW) Rest of World, from within the U.S., as well as organizations from outside the U.S. looking at insurable assets, whether personnel or physical, within the U.S.,” explains Madden.
Having achieved a global presence with ventures in Japan, Australia, Europe, and North America, GeoSure is constantly in the process of enhancing their innovative technology and strategic assets. The company is currently expanding its data harvesting capabilities to provide accurate analysis down to the street level. Given the geographic footprint of companies in the mining and energy industries, as well as the advancements in the data harvesting technology, Becker and Madden are aiming to incorporate remote as well as austere locations in their scoring system to assist these sectors. “We have an insatiable appetite for data that relates to safety, health, and welfare, while at the same time promoting safety stewardship to key stakeholders, communities and consumers, which ultimately helps to achieve our mission” concludes Becker.
