Fluttrbox use crowdsourced Drone tech to improve property underwriting and insurance claims

Let me start by defining what I do not mean by the term ‘drone”. Contrary to some reports in the media, a drone is not a nickname for a middle manager in the claims department! Nor is it a name for a short-range model airplane flown in a field on a Sunday morning by an enthusiast with a clear line of sight to the model.

What I mean by a drone is a remote controlled autonomous or semi-autonomous aircraft. Or, to be precise, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). These are lite-weight, vertical takeoff, helicopter-like flying machines controlled by GPS or software with a range of up to 200 miles.

The world-wide market for drones is growing at a pace. According to Business Insider earlier this year, “the market for commercial/civilian drones will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 19% between 2015 and 2020.”

And, in the 2015 market study by Teal Group, global production for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles will total $93bn in the next ten years!

The commercial application of drones spans many industries;

• Amazon and Google have well publicized plans to make commercial parcel deliveries using drones within a 30 mile radius
• Dublin fire brigade has announced plans to use drones by the end of the year to gather crucial intelligence on fires and other emergency situations.
• Journalists and the media are deploying drones to capture footage. Examples here include the BBC using a drone to film London’s new Crossrail project.
• BP has been developing drone technology since 2006 to perform tasks in some of the harshest areas of the world. Its drones can inspect a 3km section of pipeline in 30 mins when it would take a human 7 days to complete the same task. 

And when you consider how these other industries are using drone technology, it is easy to see how insurance can benefit too when it comes to assessing both risk and claims.

Drones are a simple, flexible and low cost option to get at, and into, places that a mere mortal would struggle to do. And with the quality of 4k imagery hanging off a gimbal on the underside of a drone, this tech enables insurance carriers to do much more than they can today using conventional methods.

From underwriting through to claims, drone technology can improve the end-to-end insurance process.

So, to find out more, I interviewed Justin Rotondo, Head of Operations at Montreal-based Fluttrbox.

Justin explained to me; “our goal at Fluttrbox is to give insurance firms the tools to get more information from, and about, their clients. When assessing a property risk, drones can provide detailed survey information of the outside of a large commercial property that would otherwise not be accessible.”

Founded in 2014 by Aristo Mohit-Coker, Fluttrbox provide drone services to property insurance carriers. Using drones to survey the outside of a building, Fluttrbox use the images and data collected by the drone to build detailed Maps. These models are uploaded to the underwriters and used for assessing and pricing the risk.

The traditional way of underwriting a property would have involved (the cost and time of) a manual inspection. And a reliance on documents such as out of date plans and historical structural surveys.

With Fluttrbox, the underwriters have an up to date and detailed model from which to assess the risk. And the beauty of this solution is that the data is accessible from wherever the underwriter is on whatever technology they want to use.

To paraphrase Francis Bacon’s well-known saying, if the mountain won’t come to Mohammad, he can send a drone!

To read the full article and find out how Fluttrbox are using drone tech to improve both the underwriting and claims process, go here.

Daily Fintech Advisers provide strategic consulting to organizations with business and investment interests in Fintech.