A bit of good London market data news flew slightly under the radar this week. A pair of organisations known usually by their acronyms – London Insurance Market Operations & Strategic Sourcing (LIMOSS), and McKenzie Intelligence Services (MIS) – have signed a deal.

MIS provides post-disaster satellite loss imagery and other assessment data. LIMOSS buys things collectively for the market – Lloyd’s and the London companies. The deal isn’t new – MIS started supplying through the LMA back in 2017 – but the current deal is broader.

Alastair Walker, the man behind the prolific Insurance Edge news service, observed that “more detailed data following Cat events is definitely a good thing.” Who can argue with that? The key, of course, is that the data is curated, organised, and presented in a way which is useful, comprehensible, and easily accessible for the intended users.

In the case of MIS data, it’s clear that those users are claims personnel. I remember one such individual, a syndicate claims man, telling me about a building hit by Hurricane Michael. (It was back when I was still underwriting.) The insured said it was destroyed by the storm.

At first glance, the earth observation imagery from MIS, taken immediately after the storm, showed a building that looked perfectly intact. But closer examination revealed quite clearly that it had moved about a dozen feet from its original location in Florida. The claim was authorised immediately.

No doubt a human loss adjuster would have notice this just as quickly, but the claims man said it was currently taking them at least two weeks to get to sites in the area for preliminary adjudications. So in practise it would have been just as quickly two weeks later.

The key to the success of this story is that the claims man had just the right data in exactly the right place. An insurance company could have all the data in the world,* but it has no value unless it is curated to ensure that just the right data is exactly where it’s needed, at just the right time.

That’s what your IT platforms should be doing.

* Actually, it couldn’t.