Seeing into the future (from above) with SAR

It is not difficult to find new technology within or circling the insurance industry, and probably just as easy—or even easier—to find a company touting some new thing that they promise will be a revolution.

But, every now and again, something does come up that may shift and change the game somewhat.

One new item that may prove to be a game-changer is synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the use of which is coming to the insurance market courtesy of ICEYE.

Lisa Wardlaw, global head of insurance solutions at the company, joined Intelligent Insurer on the 1.1 Club, our online and on-demand platform for one-on-one interviews with industry leaders, to give an overview of its development, its application, and the benefits it could bring.

First, a definition. SAR is not an entirely new technology, but it is one that some will be unaware of. According to NASA, “SAR is a type of active data collection where a sensor produces its own energy and then records the amount of that energy reflected back after interacting with the Earth. While optical imagery is similar to interpreting a photograph, SAR data require a different way of thinking, in that the signal is instead responsive to surface characteristics such as structure and moisture.”

It is a technology that ICEYE is aiming to bring to the market, and the company claims that it will enable “entirely new levels of access to data for persistent monitoring of large and small areas across the globe—every few hours, day and night”, said Wardlaw.

She added that while the technology has been around for decades, it is only now available widely through ICEYE. “SAR has existed since the 1960s,” she said. “It’s a little like quantum computing in the sense that it’s always been around but was too big to be deployed in a way that could be commercialised or democratised. But our co-founders found a way to do this, to simplify and miniaturise it while also making it robust.”

SAR technology, said Wardlaw, is “phenomenal”. “It’s much more closely linked to the frequency of a microwave than a camera lens. It’s not optical and it’s not taking camera images. It’s beaming imagery down, and based on the refraction of that imagery, it’s able to create images.

“But because it’s a beam, we can see through night, clouds, volcanic dust, ash, and fire. That gives us an incredible foray into talking about insurance.”

Many of the conversations with Intelligent Insurer in recent weeks have centred around the protection gap in Asia. But there is another gap that rarely gets spoken about: the lack of real-time knowledge that insurers have whenever a disaster or catastrophe is unfolding. SAR technology, says Wardlaw, can be an aid in this area.

“There’s a lot of components to this protection gap,” she said. “One is the affordability and desirability to ensure that you’re protected. Another is the frequency and severity curve, which means that the more frequent events are—and this goes into climate change, too—the price goes up. As that frequency and severity lead to a natural price increase, that only exacerbates the protection gap.”

This is where ICEYE comes in. “As dutiful members of society, we don’t just want people to go and take out insurance policies—we want them to be protected. And the way we can help is to find affordable ways to deliver protection and radically decrease that protection gap,” Wardlaw explained.

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Practical help

Better data, it seems, leads to better decisions, and thence to a better product. Those sums seem to stack up quite easily.

“We’re giving data and insights that have never existed before,” said Wardlaw, “in the sense that it’s observed data in near-real time. We’re helping with the risk profile, and we’re trying to understand and support teams on how you can see and understand ongoing risk, which could help with affordability and pricing.

“And because we’re looking at data in real time, we’re able to help insurers get insights about what we call ‘the extent’. Flooding is a great use case, because not every area in a zone is flooded.”

ICEYE found its services called upon following flooding in south west Japan in August. Initial news coverage of the floods came out around August 14, but ICEYE had begun work five days earlier.

Said Wardlaw: “We began pre-monitoring conditions on August 9. Two to three days before the peak, we were there to monitor and to start deploying our SAR and acquiring imagery. From SAR data and with third-party imagery from August 11, we were able to see the peak in a number of regions.

“The next layer is what we call ‘analysis’, which is how the client works with it. We delivered data to the clients that were affected and could give them the number of buildings impacted and the depth of the flood. And for the area of Kurume, specifically, we had a depth indicator by zone where we could layer on geolocations of our client’s portfolios and feed back a visibility map of where the buildings were, where the coverage map was, and what was going on in the flood event.”

View the full 1.1 Club interview here