This article as written by Graham Shippy at Nationwide:
Innovative partnership uses artificial intelligence (AI), aerial imagery to enhance commercial property underwriting
A partnership that started five years ago with a venture capital investment and led to a successful commercial integration is being extended yet again.
After leveraging Betterview property and risk insights for more than 100,000 Nationwide-insured properties, the companies signed a new, three-year partnership extension with plans to further evolve the innovative collaboration with future automation.
“Our budding relationship with Betterview is a testament to the opportunity we saw when making our initial venture commitment in 2018,” said Tony Fenton, Nationwide’s vice president of Commercial Lines Underwriting and Product. “We feel the sky is the limit with this partnership and look forward to the next step in our integration journey as we continue our focus on expertise, technology and world-class underwriting.”
The Betterview platform, which is quickly becoming essential for every transaction around buildings and properties, uses aerial imagery, computer vision detections, and third-party property intelligence to provide P&C insurers with a comprehensive, actionable view of real property risk. The insights on the Betterview platform help insurers to predict and prevent losses, increase underwriting and inspections efficiency, and build a more transparent customer experience.
“This technology is critical to helping us better understand, select and price commercial property risks in an increasingly challenging market,” said Fenton. “It’s easy to see the ways we can incorporate Betterview’s unique data elements to influence our risk selection, location intelligence and catastrophe modeling processes – to name a few.”
The insurer also sees potential to save on future claims through reduced losses and expenses. And for members, in addition to higher quality coverage and more accurate pricing, Betterview’s property insights can enable easier detection of roof concerns and proactive risk mitigation.
“Nationwide has been a tremendous partner and trusted advisor in helping empower Betterview’s growth since we began our relationship in 2018,” said David Tobias, co-founder and chief operations officer at Betterview. “We’ve applied many learnings from the partnership to help grow our capabilities and become the leading platform for understanding property intelligence and risk. We look forward to continuing to evolve our work with Nationwide through automation to further improve underwriting selection.”
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