30th September 2020
• Only 15 percent of US homes are insured against flooding
• US Private flood insurance market is growing exponentially, but process of buying a flood policy is difficult and tedious
• UK firm pioneers new website to speed up the process and make it easier, simpler and faster both for the consumer, and private flood broker
According to the Insurance Information Institute, only 15 percent of homeowners in America have any flood insurance coverage. This massive flood insurance coverage gap has been highlighted by catastrophic hurricanes over the last few years, most notably, Hurricane Harvey in which an astonishing 80% of flood losses were uninsured.
Built by software engineers at Shoothill in the UK and USA, My Flood Insurance (MFI) is directly aimed to help millions of uninsured homeowners close this coverage gap and protect their homes from the devastating effects of flooding.
“Unlike the UK, flood insurance is not included on standard home insurance policies in the US and is only provided by a specialist flood insurance broker. Until now the process of taking out a flood insurance policy has been a cumbersome and time consuming process, both for the consumer and for the broker” said Rod Plummer, MD of Shoothill.
“The main problem is that unlike insuring a car, where variables like its age, make, engine size etc mean is comparatively easy for an insurer to provide a quote, when it comes to adequate flood insurance coverage on a property, the differences in house types, construction methods, location, elevation, etc all mean that these variables are generally pretty unique for each and every property in the US. So, getting the right insurance at the right price, means not only getting the details about the property correct by the consumer to the broker, usually on a phone, and during working hours only, but also a lot of tedious searching of many separate insurance providers for the best quote by the broker, which can literally take hours. Shoothill set out to change that” He added.
Simon Jeavons COO of Shoothill in the UK and Aurora Insurance Technologies in the USA added “My Flood Insurance speeds all this up by allowing property owners and flood insurance brokers alike the ability to type in any US address, add the details of the selected property and the level of coverage in $ they require. Once the details are completed online, the system then generates flood insurance quotes from multiple carriers automatically, and on the fly, thus giving the consumer or broker a choice of the most suitable policy for that property, within seconds. Although the back end of the site is incredibly complicated, for the user we’ve worked extremely hard to make the process as easy and simple as possible, which is what we do best at Shoothill”
Tuna Siraci, CEO of National Flood Insurance, one of the largest flood-only insurance agencies in the US, said “This all came about from Shoothill’s ground-breaking Flood Warning System in the UK (www.floodalerts.com)
We saw it had been licensed by the UK Government Environment Agency (EA) and the BBC, and so we knew we had found the right software partner to be able to build a website of this complexity and magnitude. Until MFI, we’ve been doing it the old way, because we have had to. Thanks to the technical know how of Shoothill and Aurora Insurance technologies, this perfect marriage of insurance and technology will allow us and end users here in the US to be able to select and purchase a flood insurance policy online, at their leisure”
My Flood Insurance is now available and free to use in the USA at www.myfloodinsurance.com
