Data analytics and technology are gaining traction in efforts to mitigate the risks facing wineries and to bring more precision to the underwriting and claims process, experts say.
But this can also present challenges for policyholders in a hardening insurance market, brokers say.
“Data has always been used in the production of wine,” said Kaj Ahlmann, former CEO of General Electric Co.’s Employers Reinsurance Corp. division and co-owner of the Six Sigma Ranch and Vineyards in Lake County, California.
“I jokingly call my winery Six Sigma,” he said. “It started maybe as a joke. We’re pretty damn serious about everything. We have data all the way from when we do the first soil analysis, and we question our customers when they come into the tasting room about how they found us, and that goes straight into a database.”
On the insurer side, technology is being used to better assist those policyholders located in fire zones during wildfire events, said Stephanie Moriarty, San Francisco-based vice president, property/casualty, at USI Insurance Services LLC.
“Insurers have a heat map of where their risks are placed and who is being affected, and they are able to reach out proactively to those clients and start preparing the claims process,” she said.
“But then it also makes it easier for insurers to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to put a moratorium on binding coverage because you’re in a fire zone right now,’ so it makes it easier for them to restrict (coverage),” Ms. Moriarty added.
Risk modeling has become more sophisticated, which helps brokers better understand what the probability of loss is and communicate that to insurers, said John Ring, Sacramento, California-based senior vice president, property/casualty, at USI Insurance Services LLC.
“Insurers are understanding where their concentration of risk potentially is, so they know when they need to stop writing customers in a certain geographic area because they might be too exposed for certain risks,” he said.
Chubb deploys infrared scanning capabilities and drones as part of its risk engineering services, said Frank Goudsmit, St. Louis-based senior vice president, life sciences practice and food industries practice leader at Chubb Ltd.
“You can use the infrared scans to look for hot spots in the production equipment. Then you can identify an emerging issue and resolve it prior to it resulting in loss,” Mr. Goudsmit said.
Certified drone pilots fly drones over an insured location and assess vulnerabilities, “such as areas where the roof membrane needs some additional support to avoid a water intrusion event, for example,” he said.
