Swiss Re Corporate Solutions said it is debuting parametric water-level insurance. AXA XL Risk Consulting disclosed it is using artificial intelligence (AI) to boost its property risk engineering capabilities.
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Swiss Re Corporate Solutions is launching parametric water-level insurance called “FLOW.”
This new index-based product is designed to protect companies in Europe from the financial impact of high or low river water levels, such as lost revenue due to business interruption or increased costs due to risk mitigation measures.
Swiss Re Corporate Solutions’ experts structure an index formula that references to measured water levels at defined river gauges. The customized index tracks the client’s water-level exposure related to revenues and costs. Each contract is tailor-made to the individual exposure of the client.
Unlike traditional insurance covers, which often require loss investigations and adjudication, FLOW provides payout of fixed amounts based on a defined index, for example, each day the index remains below or above the defined index threshold value.
Other factors that determine FLOW’s payout amounts are the increased costs of operation, additional expenses to mitigate the situation, as well as expenses not covered by traditional insurance policies, Swiss Re Corporate Solutions said.
FLOW is available in the European markets of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the Nordics, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K.
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AXA XL Risk Consulting said it is using artificial intelligence (AI) to boost its property risk engineering capabilities.
AXA XL Risk Consulting is working with Expert System, an Italian developer of cognitive computing software based on AI algorithms. In order to help with the assessment of property site surveys, the team is using Cogito, an Expert 
System platform that uses AI to automate the process of reading site survey reports through natural language processing.
The platform lets the AXA risk consulting team expand the breadth of documentation and volume of accounts that can be reviewed, focus risk engineering time on high-impact areas, increase its ability to mitigate client site risk, and allow underwriters to decrease their speed-to-quote time, the company said in a statement.
As a result, AXA XL’s risk consultants are able to extract the knowledge and insights from 100-plus-page engineering surveys within minutes, the company added.
Sources: Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, AXA XL