Zurich and Previsico collaborate on major UK client’s flood risk resilience

Flood forecaster Previsico is working with Zurich Insurance Company (Zurich) and one of their major UK customers in a market-first tripartite pilot across 5,000 UK locations. The aim is to plug a major flood forecasting gap around surface water flooding and significantly reduce the cost of false alarms.

Surface water flooding is the biggest flood risk in the UK, affecting many businesses, including Zurich’s customer and 3 million people in the UK, compared to river and sea flood risk, which affects 2.4 million people. The scale of the issue came into the spotlight once again following Storm Christoph, which was forecasted by Previsico, utilising the latest geospatial technology and weather predictions, in partnership with IBM.

Jonathan Jackson, CEO, Previsico, said: “We are delighted to collaborate with Zurich and their major corporate customer, one of the biggest household names in the UK, to pilot our unique live flood forecasting solution on a commercial basis. This will help to reduce the impact of surface water flooding, including the huge cost and waste of reliance resources caused by current inaccurate early warning systems for surface water and small watercourse floods.

Jonathan Newbery, head of digital experience at Zurich, said: “We are excited to work on this pilot with Previsico and our exceptional customer with their sophisticated flood risk management team and processes. The insights we gain from this tripartite experience will help us to better understand how we can support our commercial customers on critical issues like flooding, using innovative and digitally enabled approaches like Previsico’s.”

Already relied upon by the Cabinet Office and Emergency Services, Previsico’s flood forecasting technology provides insurers with the ability to alert customers of imminent flooding, down to an individual property level (25m). This enables them to take action to reduce losses and the impact this has across other areas of the business, such as the customer experience, underwriting, claims, loss accumulation, and sustainability.

Previsico’s solution also provides a visualisation tool in the case of flooding, so that claims teams can more accurately understand where incidents have occurred to reach affected properties and people. The visualization tool enables insurers to offer a better service, leading to happier customers, as well as enabling an earlier indication of total losses, reduced fraud, and improved claims efficiency.

Did you get value from this story?  Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories like this sent straight to your inbox.