The focus on innovation and ideation within large insurance carriers continues to yield new kinds of cooperation between companies.
Arturo, a spin-out from American Family Insurance that provides geospatial data and analytics services, has been selected by Hippo, a home insurance insurtech to assist it in quoting and underwriting.
Arturo’s offerings will be used by Hippo to pre-fill certain home data in order to reduce friction and omissions during the sales process. It’s part of a range of big data tools used by Hippo to smooth out the home insurance customer experience; the company also works with Verisk and Zillow.
“The question was with common data elements like roof slope, things that can be difficult for customers to answer, can we prefill?” says Michael Gulla, senior director of underwriting for Hippo. “A lot of this we display to the customer, let them make the selection.”
In particular, an attractive component of Arturo’s platform was its confidence rating that comes along with the data. Hippo sometimes receives the same data element from multiple sources; Arturo helps rate the trustworthiness of the data point so that the insurer knows to what level to rely on it in its processes.
“We built a hierarchy matrix that will look at all the overlapping data elements and decide which one to populate for the customer,” Gulla explains. “Arturo provides us their own internal confidence score for each piece of data which makes our accuracy even better.”
The story of Arturo within AmFam begins about three years ago, according to John-Isaac Clark, CEO for the spinout. Formerly of Digital Globe, now Maxar, another geospatial data provider, Clark was brought in as AmFam’s work leveraging third-party aerial, satellite and other such data evolved.
“The question AmFam had was could you generate digital property attributes more currently using satellite, aerial or ground-level imagery,” Clark says. “It also had relevance for adjacent markets to insurance like residential lending.”
AmFam retains an equity interest in Arturo, but the company is free to work with other carriers, in a similar way to Allstate’s Arity and MassMutual’s LifeScore Labs.
“We worked with Hippo in a stealth mode to further refine and hone the product,” Clark says.S
