Public Protection Classification (PPC) data to help support digital transformation of its property underwriting
Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan selects Verisk’s LOCATION Platform (Credit: FreeDigitalPhotos.net/peleluangwang.)
Verisk, a leading data analytics provider, and Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan (Farm Bureau Insurance), announced today that Farm Bureau Insurance will adopt Verisk’s LOCATION platform to maximize its use of Public Protection Classification (PPC) for precise, address-level measurement of the strength of fire protection for insured properties.
Farm Bureau Insurance will use LOCATION, which can deliver address-level information on a variety of risks, to drive PPC’s fire protection grading deeper into its underwriting workflow. The PPC program provides grades to communities across the United States based on their fire prevention and suppression systems.
“In conjunction with our digital transformation initiative to streamline our underwriting operations, we analyzed how we could move beyond manual entry of fire protection data at point of sale to capture this critical risk factor with greater precision,” said Dawn Elzinga, Vice President of Underwriting and Actuarial at Farm Bureau Insurance. “It’s an opportunity to achieve more accurate pricing for our customers and stronger underwriting performance throughout our property portfolio. We turned to Verisk to deliver this data.”
Granular information applied to underwriting and rating decisions can materially affect loss experience—and, ultimately, profitability. A property’s PPC code is based on a thorough grading of a community’s firefighting capabilities and mitigation efforts—and the location of that property relative to responding fire stations and adequate water resources.
“This unique proprietary measurement has been and continues to be the industry gold standard for measuring this type of risk,” said Doug Caccese, president of ISO Personal Lines. “When we looked at modeled versus actual experience, our analysis found PPC to be nine times more powerful at predicting future fire loss than distance to nearest fire station alone. With LOCATION, we can help companies of all sizes enhance their usage of PPC as part of their journey toward increasing digitization.”
PPC’s level of granularity reflects Verisk’s continual monitoring of robust data sources and use of digitized files and state-of-the-art geographic information system (GIS) technology—all backed by decades-long, community-level relationships with the fire service and local authorities. And with delivery via application programming interface (API), implementation is flexible.
Source: Company Press Release