Beazley, a specialist re/insurer and provider of weather-related coverage for event organisers, has partnered with Weather Decision Technologies (WDT) to automate the payment of claims under its Beazley Weather Guard policy.
The collaboration will allow Beazley to offer a digitised, personalisable policy that automatically pays policyholders based on the occurrence of specific adverse weather conditions, as recorded by WDT.
If selected as the claims verification source, WDT will simply send both the policyholder and Beazley its weather records for the event location and, if the weather reaches or exceeds specific severity levels, payment will be settled without any need to file a claim.
WDT utilises big data solutions to develop and provide analytics like hazardous weather detection and prediction, high resolution forecasts, decision analytics, historical weather, content for mobile apps, and interactive mapping.
Beazley Weather Guard can be applied to any cases where severe weather may cause the cancellation of an outdoor event, or to weather-related retail sales promotions.
In addition to automatic claims service, the policy has been designed so that policyholders can access it via mobile phone, and has been plainly and transparently worded.
Christian Phillips, Contingency Underwriter at Beazley, said: “Our clients need swift claims service and flexible insurance coverage to address the wide range of weather risks that could imperil their events. But they also want simply worded policies – no-one likes insurance small print.
“We believe we’ve created the simplest insurance policy on the market – one that can be entirely personalized to reflect exactly the coverage the client has bought.”
The language of the new digital policy describes precisely and exclusively the coverage purchased by a particular policyholder, and prominently spells out the trigger for coverage together with the sum insured.
William Pitt, Chief Marketing Officer at Beazley, said: “Insurers have generally struggled with plain English policy wordings. Traditional policies are one-size-fits-all documents that describe every possible form of coverage the policyholder might have bought. To remind yourself of what you actually have bought, you have to constantly flick back to the declarations page.
“We asked ourselves: What would happen if all the information on the declarations page was instead integrated into the policy wording itself? When we did this, we found that it made the policy much easier to understand. Instead of ‘named insured,’ we could insert the actual name of the policyholder. Instead of ‘sum insured,’ we could insert a dollar amount. It all became much less abstract.”
