AXA UK Launches Underwriting Tool

London-based AXA Insurance has made a new geo-coding underwriting tool available to its underwriters for the assessment of flood and subsidence risks, the company announced late last month. Built by based location intelligence solutions provider Mapflow (Dublin, Ireland), the new tool aims to enable underwriters to accurately assess flood, subsidence and terrorism risks for individual buildings, as opposed to postcode areas. AXA has made the tool available to all its underwriters and a version for its brokers is currently in development.

According to a press release, the insurer's current postcode-based assessments sometimes lead to incorrectly declined properties and wrongly assessed risks. With the new tool in place, AXA expects those issues to be reduced. In addition, the company is expecting reduced quotations times and fewer referrals.

"This technology provides our underwriters with the geographical intelligence needed to understand flood, subsidence and terrorism risks," Steve Wilcox, head of underwriting and technical development at AXA said in the release. "It will help us better understand our risk exposures and accumulation and ensure we are getting value from our reinsurance purchases."