Stephen Lathrope: Using Geospatial Data To Drive Dynamic Underwriting

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Stephen Lathrope, a seasoned executive and proven business leader who has worked as a partner, CEO, and executive director, of private equity-backed financial services and technology businesses. Stephen has also lead large teams within a very well known consulting firm. Today Stephen leads the insurance practice at ICEYE, a geospatial data provider to the insurance and government sector. According to a report produced by MarketsandMarkets, the global geospatial analytics market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 12.2% from $68 billion dollars in 2022 to $120 billion dollars by 2027. One of the main drivers is the increasing demand for location-based services across various industries, including transportation, construction, and agriculture but also for urban planning and management, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. Over the course of the podcast, they explore what is geospatial data used for? How does geospatial inform the future underwriting and claims? Deep dive into examples as to where geospatial data is best used, and Stephen to give us some advice for insurance companies looking to incorporate geospatial data into their underwriting and claims processes. KEY TAKEAWAYS          ICEYE has been around since 2014 as an organisation that is one of the growth ion new space technologies. The founders miniaturised synthetic aperture radar technology and were able to put them onto miniaturised satellites. The first use case for that for monitoring ice flows in the northern seas for freight planning, hence the ‘ICE’ part of ICEYE. What it does today is build and operate its own constellation of radar-enabled satellites, and for insurance we use those to observe hazard and damage related to natural catastrophe and we can also monitor assets on the ground. We can measure very small movements in vehicles, buildings, the surface of the Earth. The opportunities around catastrophe events like that for insurers are really significant. What we can do with new technology is provide a much more rapid insight into where the water is and where the high-water mark has been very quickly within an event. We can provide our customers with an initial view of where the water is within a few hours, we provide a very detailed reports of flood depth and the depth of water with a very useful degree of accuracy. Our customers associate that with the perimeter of individual buildings and that enables them to very quickly identify which of their customers need assistance most urgently, how much water is likely to be around a property causing how much damage and where to allocate resources on the ground. The kind of data we provide is used to size the overall cost of an event and the individual potential damage cost associated with individual buildings. One of the very common challenges that we have to work through with our customers is to ask “do you really know where the properties that you’re insuring are?” It’s a factor just how often we can say the water is at 1 metre depth at a particular latitude and longitude and the insurer is trying to work out where that is relative to the properties that they know they have that are affected by the event.   BEST MOMENTS ‘ICEYE is bringing wholly new technology to bear in an industry that has got loads of opportunity to do things differently and better for customers and stakeholders using the insights that we can provide from space and with data and analytics.’
‘The majority of what we’re doing in insurance, and with government, is around natural catastrophe: response, and near-term preparation for events that look like they’re about to happen.’
‘There’s only going to be more frequent, more severe flooding. As we speak there’s a fairly major even happening in Mississippi which we