Last week, we wrote a post about a number of bulletins of potential interest to property insurers issued by the Texas Department of Insurance concerning the appropriate conduct of those involved in the insurance claims process in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. The Texas DOI has continued its response to Hurricane Harvey, issuing two new
claims handling
Drone Mapping the Way of the Future for Insurance Companies
Drone mapping provides insurance companies with an easy, fast and accurate method of documenting a scene and preserving key details while also letting the process of clean-up and reconstruction begin as quickly as possible. Recently, Dronotec, a start-up company specializing in drone inspection for insurance companies conducted a case study to determine just how much money this drone mapping was saving insurance companies. Dronotec’s founder, Emilien Rose, worked as a loss assessor in France and Australia for 10 years and conducted assessments of about 8,000 claims. Rose believes that Dronetec and drone mapping can really save time and money for insurers.
For example, recently a fire in France consumed 5 acres of a vacation destination on the coast. Once the insurance company came in to assess the damages, they realized that the sheer size of the site posed quite a challenge. Moreover, so much of the property was damaged by the fire, inspectors could not enter the properties or inspect the roofs without the threat of personal injury. A plane attempted to capture photos but many of the photos were not clear or sharp enough to use. However, the loss adjuster recommend a drone to do the mapping of the scene. In about 10 minutes, the drone collected more than 300 geo-tagged photos flying about 180 feet over the property. The images were uploaded to a drone mapping program, and three hours later a 2-D map and 3-D model of the property and the damages were available. The high degree of accuracy of not only the photos but the mapping improved the likelihood of identifying the cause of the accident exponentially. And the insurance company’s team members were able to collaborate and review the mapping in one cloud-based space. In this one case, the use of drone mapping saved this French insurance company about €99,985,000 (or about $110,600,000).
The ability to quickly process claims is very helpful to insurance companies with large scale disasters that have many claims filed related to the same incident.
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California Supreme Court clarifies availability of insurance-related Unfair Competition Law (UCL) claims
The California Supreme Court recently issued a significant decision regarding the applicability of that state’s Unfair Competition Law (UCL) to the insurance industry, allowing certain types of such claims to be brought against insurers, potentially expanding insurers’ extra-contractual liability in that jurisdiction. On August 1, 2013, in Zhang v. The Superior Court Of San Bernardino …
Hurricane Sandy Insurance Claims: What Insurers Should Focus On
Insurers are starting to deploy adjusters to handle claims from Hurricane Sandy. An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports that “Disaster-modeling firm AIR Worldwide estimates the industry’s share of losses at $7 billion to $15 billion. At the high end of that range, Sandy would become the third-most expensive storm for insurers in U.S.…
State Insurance Departments Issue Bulletins Regarding Claims Handling Related to Hurricane Sandy
Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, and Rhode Island Insurance Departments have issued several bulletins regarding general claims handling for Hurricane Sandy. Links to the bulletins are provided here:
Connecticut
http://www.ct.gov/cid/lib/cid/Bulletin_IC-28_Storm_Sandy_October_2012.pdf
http://www.ct.gov/cid/lib/cid/Bulletin_IC-30_Storm_Sandy_October_2012.pdf
http://www.ct.gov/cid/lib/cid/Bulletin_IC-32_Storm_Sandy_October_2012.pdf
Delaware
New Jersey
http://www.state.nj.us/dobi/bulletins/blt12_12.pdf
Rhode Island
http://www.dbr.ri.gov/documents/divisions/insurance/consumers/IndustryAlert2012-3.pdf
We will continue to monitor affected states’ insurance department websites for further bulletins regarding Hurricane Sandy.