Business News: LexisNexis, Oyster, AGCS

LexisNexis Fire and Disaster Response Aids Insurers in Rating, Underwriting Fire Risk

LexisNexis Risk Solutions announced a new data score that will enable insurers to more accurately rate and underwrite local fire responses using predictive analytics. The LexisNexis® Fire and Disaster Response Score can help property insurers improve profitability, streamline processes, and reduce expenses by leveraging more robust geographic and fire-specific data sources.

The LexisNexis data-driven approach to fire response scoring achieves consistent results by incorporating cutting-edge geospatial technology, historic fire department responses and loss data, true drive times from responding fire stations, and other data sources to help precisely model the peril of fire. It also provides the level of risk at the location area, which is an advantage as the LexisNexis Fire and Disaster Response score provides a more granular geographic fire risk than is typically available and used in the industry.

By converting this quantifiable data into actionable intelligence, this solution estimates an average future loss severity based on fire station response capabilities by segmenting risk into 10 different segments. Nationally, the homes at highest risk for a fire are more than 2 times riskier than those considered low risk, based on fire response.

Oyster Insurance Expands Workers’ Compensation Coverage into California

Oyster Insurance, a provider of small business insurance, announced that they have begun protecting small businesses in California. Now licensed in 26 states, Oyster plans to launch their workers’ compensation coverage in an additional six states throughout 2019.

The insurer has been providing workers’ compensation to over 70 classes of business in New York and New Jersey since January of this year. Coverage initially began with professional classes such as software consulting firms, lawyers and medical and dental offices. The company has expanded into covering variety stores, groceries/delis, bakeries, eating places, drug stores, jewelry stores and florists.

Oyster uniquely provides partners the ability to offer workers’ compensation coverage that is bindable online to small business owners. As businesses juggle a number of demands on a daily basis, Oyster is enabling entrepreneurs and small business owners the ability to bind coverage online 24×7. Providing real-time quoting and binding capabilities to partners has been a significant factor in Oyster’s growth.

AGCS Extends Partnership with Praedicat to Mitigate Product Safety Risks

Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS), the Allianz corporate insurance carrier, together with Praedicat, an InsurTech analytics company based in Los Angeles, are expanding their partnership to provide a unique analytic resource to policyholders. Specifically, AGCS clients will benefit from access to ChemMeta, Praedicat’s software product delivering science and regulatory risk analytics for industrial companies.

ChemMeta helps both chemical manufacturers and those who incorporate chemicals downstream to minimize their product safety risks. Based on the latest peer-reviewed scientific literature and risk analysis, ChemMeta provides companies customized intelligence on thousands of chemicals and materials to help make better decisions across critical functions, including product stewardship, R&D, enterprise risk management, EHS and regulatory affairs.

Understanding emerging risks inherent in any manufacturing process is particularly relevant in the chemical, pharmaceutical and food & beverage industries. In the end, it is relevant to any corporation which produces or uses chemicals within their own value chain.

Large companies might employ teams of up to 100 scientists to monitor scientific publications and track relevant findings. However, the scope of their activity is often limited due to manual analysis and, as a result, only a certain number of production elements can be thoroughly investigated. For small and medium companies, resources are even scarcer. At the same time, there is exponential growth of data and information as a result of digitalization. To comprehensively evaluate chemical products or ingredients at a company, a scalable approach is required.

AGCS liability insurance policyholders may receive access to ChemMeta for a defined period. After this period, they can opt for their own subscription to the analytics.