​Hiscox declares industry first with use of wildfire modelling tool in London market

Hiscox has teamed up with Bellwether as it looks to to bring an innovative approach to wildfire modelling.

In this partnership, Hiscox London market’s property division will work alongside the Bellwether team to integrate its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered wildfire tool alongside existing risk scoring and modelling.

Hiscox, which said it would be the first to use this tool in the London market, hopes this will enhance risk selection and pricing alongside increased availability of cover.

Bellwether’s wildfire prediction tool analyses large volumes of data to help estimate wildfire risk at any location using historical information about the environment in combination with thousands of other risk drivers.

The Bellwether model is the only system that can forecast wildfire risk up to five years in advance and generate absolute wildfire risk scores that include transparent accounting of what factors contributed to each score.

Sarah Russell, managing director at Bellwether, said: “Bellwether leverages the best of Google’s geospatial knowledge and AI technology to help companies and communities adapt better to the changing landscape of severe weather events like wildfire.

”We are excited to be working with Hiscox to show how Bellwether can help provide additional measurement, analysis and predictions for this dynamic risk and, in turn, assist in the availability and sustainable provision of wildfire insurance for Californian homeowners.”

’Powerful combination’

The new model is already helping to provide additional insurance options for Californian homeowners.

James Brady, Hiscox London market’s property divisional director, said: “This partnership allows us to integrate the very latest AI-powered modelling from Bellwether with other third-party models and our own advanced risk modelling framework.

”It’s a powerful combination that can support a much more sustainable insurance solution for Californian homeowners. With this world-class, multimodel approach, we can quantify an insured’s exposure to wildfire risk with more precision, which in turn enables us to offer Hiscox capacity to a wider range of customers.”