Verisk discontinues telematics offering and more

Verisk hosted its Q1’24 earnings call on May 1, 2024, highlighting observations on AI, automation and connected car data.

Verisk recently hosted its flagship Verisk Insurance Conference (VIC), where its Extreme Events division launched Next Generation Models (NGM), a suite of over 100 models for risk assessment across all perils. ‘With next-generation models, our clients can make better financial assessments of loss potential and more accurately represent the risk to their policyholders, their businesses, and their partners,’ said CEO Lee Shavel. ‘NGM also offers new advantages to support complex insurance policy structures and to address new terms and conditions that were previously unmodeled.’

Verisk also introduced Filing Intelligence. This tool simplifies the filings delivery process by consolidating all necessary documents, forms, rules, and loss costs into one interface, thereby eliminating the need for manual review and the piecing together of multiple documents.

On the actuarial front, Verisk added Actuarial Hub to the new platform. Within the hub, clients can access new insights such as the ISO Experience Index, the loss cost activity dashboard, and a new series of actuarial forecasting articles. ‘Looking ahead, we plan to launch additional customer-facing modules that will provide even more value to our clients by introducing new proprietary analytics, workflow tools, and insights to further streamline processes and enhance underwriting accuracy for our clients,’ said Shavel.

Shavel also commented that May 1 was officially designated as ‘Verisk Generative AI Day.’ On this day, technology teams from across Verisk’s global offices and business units gathered at the Jersey City headquarters to collaborate and share best practices and learnings about their work with GenAI. These discussions focused on both customer-facing initiatives and internal efficiencies. Verisk shared that it’s actively running GenAI pilots across all its divisions, with three solutions already in production within its claims business. One example shared by Shavel involved the use of genAI to gather and preprocess massive amounts of information to organize and distill it for the insurance professional – ‘improving and focusing their expertise, not replacing it.’ As an aside, our session on Monday at Data in Paradise succinctly summed up the benefits of the internet and AI.

Finally, regarding their auto sector, Verisk has decided to discontinue the existing telematics offering due to recent changes in their data source. The financial impact of this decision is considered immaterial for 2024, with less than $1 million in revenue impact anticipated.

When asked by Toni Michele Kaplan from Morgan Stanley’s Research Division about the discontinuation of the auto telematics offering, Shavel explained that the decision was primarily due to the entities providing the data deciding to stop doing so. He acknowledged that while discontinuing the telematics offering had a negligible financial impact, their commitment to serving auto insurers remains strong. They continue to offer a variety of products such as LightSpeed auto, coverage verifier, and damage assessment from a claims perspective. “The simple answer is that the entities that were providing that data to us decided to discontinue collecting that data. And so there was really not sufficient analytical value in that without the data that was being provided. And I think it’s fair to assume that it’s a function of some of the media attention to collect connected car data. So that really was the simple reason.”