Takeaways:
- U.K. government flood alerts were giving short notice
- Previsico technology maps and models down to 25 square meters
U.K. Environment Agency flood warnings gave just 30 minutes notice to Liberty Specialty Markets clients like Whitbread, a hospitality company.
On behalf of all its clients, Liberty turned to
Previsico starts with a risk assessment of a client, classifying flood risks at their properties as either low, medium or high, according to Sims. The company will survey client locations and make sure flood sensors are correctly placed.
"We worked with some retailers recently that told us they had a very small amount of risk, and then we plugged all of their locations into our system," Sims said. "It turned out they actually had some pretty serious risk they weren't actually aware of."
The Previsico technology allows Liberty to map properties into the insurer's own flood risk models, down to 25 square meter increments, according to Ben Fox, digital strategy lead for risk services at Liberty Specialty Markets. The alerts Previsico and Liberty generate are helping Whitbread put its staff to work on flooding threats, according to Will Symonds, operations risk manager at Whitbread.
"The alerts that we get are really, really good at showing you the level of water and the level of associated risk," he said. "That means we can really tailor the messaging to our operational team. If we're getting an alert which is telling us flooding is expected, we're clearly cascading messages to our teams to say we need to deploy flood defenses, need to employ all of the things we've got in our plan."
Senior stakeholders at insured companies like Whitbread have eagerly adopted the Previsico alert services, according to Fox.
"Getting the buy in from the senior managers in insurance and risk functions, in safety and security functions, getting that buy in across the organization, lets us operationalize it and join the dots right down to the boots on the ground," he said.
