Business News: Lemonade, CoreLogic

Lemonade Launches World’s First ‘Open Source’ Insurance Policy

Lemonade, the insurance company powered by artificial intelligence and behavioral economics, announced it has rewritten the generations-old insurance policy.

The new insurance policy, called Policy 2.0, will be open for edits from the ‘wisdom of the crowd,’ in what is the world’s first open-sourced insurance policy.

“When we set out to create an unconflicted insurance company we had to rethink the very business model of insurance,” said Daniel Schreiber, Lemonade CEO and cofounder. “Today, we’re taking a run at its foundational document: the policy itself. Policy 2.0 reflects our determination to drag insurance into the 21st century, kicking and screaming if needs be.”

While most insurance companies copyright their policy, Lemonade has done the opposite – and made it open source. Lemonade’s new policy is not only open for the community to edit Github, it is also open to all of Lemonade’s competitors to use, under the GNU’s Free Documentation License.

“Making insurance simple, fair, and approachable to everyone should be a shared goal of the entire industry,” said Shai Wininger, Chief Lemonade Maker and cofounder. “As avid open source evangelists, we believe that bringing consumers and professionals together in an effort to co-create an insurance policy, will result in a better and fairer insurance product for the 21st century.”

Lemonade recently raised a $120 million Series C round led by SoftBank. With the completion of the round, the company announced it would take Lemonade global. While Policy 2.0 is in English and aimed at US renters, this open-source initiative will expand to cover other lines, legal jurisdictions, and languages.

CoreLogic Introduces New Products WaterRisk, FireRisk

CoreLogic, a global property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider, announced the availability of two products that comprehensively assess non-weather-related water and fire risk. WaterRisk and FireRisk, both products of Location, Inc., are the first to measure frequency of non-weather-related water and fire events and represent the only non-weather-related risk assessment solutions currently available on the market.

Property insurers have historically been unable to accurately analyze the likelihood of non-weather-related hazards – such as plumbing and appliance leaks or the likelihood of house fires – due to a lack of consistent and complete data that capture unaccounted for water and fire risk. However, non-weather-related water damage accounts for approximately 20 percent of all homeowner insurance losses nationwide*, and 84 percent of home structure fires** are either intentionally ignited, smoking accidents or a result of misused or failed cooking equipment, unattended candles or failures of heating and electrical systems.

WaterRisk and FireRisk by Location, Inc. are non-weather risk solutions built using advanced predictive analytics that look at appliances, systems, wiring, structures, climate and geographical location. This enables insurers to more accurately quantify the likelihood and severity of damage from water and fire beyond previous methods of qualification. The product utilizes 2 billion data points nationwide, as well as unique geospatial risk models to generate over 11 million points of risk.

With complete, seamless U.S. coverage at the individual block level, the products offer 300 times more granularity into specific property risk factors than the average ZIP code analysis can provide. Both products identify precise, measurable data on previously unquantifiable factors such as poorly maintained properties, improper storage of flammable materials or plumbing system failures.

WaterRisk and FireRisk, are available for portfolio consumption and through RiskMeter Online from CoreLogic.