Objectives of the service
The users of BirdsEyeView’s RAPTOR™ technology consist of underwriters that insure large special events globally.
Currently, underwriters struggle to accurately model the likelihood of a Natural Catastrophe (“NatCat”) / extreme weather event hitting an insured location. Adverse weather and natural disasters account for nearly 80% insurance premium calculation and therefore accurate analytics and modelling is critical when the insurer is pricing the insurance policy. In addition to this, underwriters find that it is neither time nor cost-efficient to underwrite smaller insurance policies manually.
BirdsEyeView’s RAPTOR™ technology both:
-
automates the underwriting process, enabling brokers to submit, quote, and bind special event insurance products online. The underwriting is automated using RAPTOR™’s algorithms; and
-
provides underwriters with the weather analytics needed to correctly price the event insurance.
Both these capabilities reduce the cost of underwriting via automation and increase underwriting performance and profitability through effective pricing and risk management.
The project, working with the participant insurer Arch Insurance, piloted RAPTOR™’s ability to entirely automate the underwriting process for event premiums <£10,000 whilst providing reliable NatCat and extreme weather modelling.
Users and their needs
RAPTOR™’s customers consist of insurance companies writing Special Event (“Contingency”) insurance, such as pilot participant Arch Insurance, insurance brokers and Managing General Agents. RAPTOR™ solves the following two customer problems:
-
Inefficient manual underwriting for low-premium, high-volume business. In contingency (special-event) insurance, many policies carry premiums below ~£10,000. Processing these manually makes unit economics poor, slows turnaround, and constrains growth. RAPTOR™ addresses this by automating pricing, quote, bind and document issuance, unlocking a segment that is otherwise uneconomic for insurers to serve at scale.
-
Weather and NatCat risk is the dominant driver of outdoor event disruption and losses for insurers. Underwriters require robust, location- and time-specific probabilities of severe weather to price accurately and manage accumulation. RAPTOR™’s WEATHER ANALYTIX™ module delivers probabilistic outputs (e.g., exceedance probabilities) based on authoritative reanalysis data (for example ERA-5 Land via the Copernicus Climate Data Store), providing decision-ready inputs for underwriting and portfolio risk management.
Service/ system concept
RAPTOR™ is an online tool, accessed via web browser, that delivers two core capabilities to the customers:
-
Algorithmic Underwriting / Quote & Bind: broker-facing self-service to configure terms, receive real-time quotes, bind, and generate policy documents; referral workflow routes out-of-appetite risks to underwriters. This enables profitable handling of small-ticket, high-throughput business.
-
WEATHER ANALYTIX™: underwriter-facing probabilistic modelling that quantifies the likelihood of adverse weather at specific locations/dates to support pricing and exposure management.
Space Added Value
Space Assets Used:
BirdsEyeView uses a combination of global historical NatCat/Weather datasets to provide the user with occurrence probability figures for an extreme event occurring. This probability figure (%) is then used to price the event insurance premium.
ECMWF ERA-5 reanalysis data, retrieved from the Copernicus Hub, is the core dataset utilised. This reanalysis dataset contains a plethora of weather and climate variables derived from a 70+ radar, satellite, and in-situ/ground stations.
BirdsEyeView then runs large probabilistic models over this global historic data to provide occurrence probability (%) figures for extreme / ‘tail risk’ events.
Value over competitor products:
By using ERA-5 climate data from the Copernicus Hub, BirdsEyeView provides users with a globally homogenous, consistent, and high-resolution dataset. The net result of this, combined with RAPTOR™’s modelling, is that the underwriter can retrieve an extreme weather occurrence probability figure, based upon the inputted parameters, for any location around the world.
A competitor, one previously used by the user, used only ground-station weather data. Ground station data presents the following issues: 1) There are commonly gaps of over 50km between ground stations presenting issues in data availability and resolution 2) The quality of data retrieved from these ground-stations varies from one country to another. This creates inconsistencies in the results provided.
Current Status
BirdsEyeView has successfully completed its Demonstration Project and associated Pilot with the main project participant Arch Insurance.
Both the RAPTOR™ and WEATHER ANALYTIX™ modules are now deployed in live commercial environments with paying customers. The platform has transitioned from pilot into active use by multiple broker teams and underwriters and is delivering real policies and risk insights across the UK, EU, US, Canada, Australia, and Singapore.
The success of the project led to BirdsEyeView securing hundreds of thousands of euros of new contracts with 14 major insurers and brokers across UK, US, Europe, Australia, and Canada.
In addition to this, Arch Insurance, the main project participant, signed an extended agreement during the project with scope to incorporate five product lines into the platform, beginning with the onboarding of a new Fine Art product alongside Contingency.
Prime Contractor(s)
