Insurance carriers recognize the importance of imagery as a crucial input to meet their data requirements. However, determining the best imagery to use and how to integrate it into their systems and internal workflows can be very challenging. Insurance companies typically operate using annual or quarterly imagery, which can limit the understanding of risk due to changes at the property after image acquisition. This lack of temporal property information poses a real challenge for underwriters when it comes to accurately valuing properties and making critical risk decisions. The global geospatial imagery analytics market is expected to grow from $6.9 billion in 2020 to $27.9 billion in 2025, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.1% during the forecast period. A major growth factor is the increasing demand for location-based applications, including demand from insurance carriers. Taking a client-centric approach to solving challenges across the insurance industry is at the heart of everything we do at Arturo. To better enable insurance companies with property analytics via multi-source imagery, Arturo is constantly seeking today’s most cutting-edge providers across data, technology, and imagery. We strive to build partnerships with the ‘best of the best’, particularly during these uncertain times as we remotely manage the nuances of the property insurance life cycle during an international pandemic. In this article, we share the types of partners we seek and the three reasons why we focus on partnerships to solve the insurance industry’s most pressing challenges.

The Types of Providers Arturo Partners With

At Arturo, our partnerships are a key differentiator. Through partnerships with best-in-class providers, we offer our insurance carrier customers the most progressive technology in the aerial imagery space. Our team is always on the lookout for additional imagery sources, strategic partnerships, and innovative technology to enhance our process and push the boundaries on what we can deliver to our clients. To deliver the most accurate and current property insights, we leverage multi-source and temporal imagery including aerial, satellite, stratospheric balloons, and ground inspection imagery. The partnerships we build reflect our desire to deliver the most complete and comprehensive property coverage possible. We are proud to welcome and have these leading data providers as partners:

Stratospheric Balloons

Urban Sky

Via the new stratospheric Microballoon™, Urban Sky delivers broad area, high-resolution aerial imagery at a cost drastically less than satellites, aircraft or drones. The company’s novel invention, the high-altitude Microballoon, leverages advances in component miniaturization and first-of-its-kind material re-usability to exponentially reduce the cost of high-resolution remote sensing and weather-related data capture over broad areas, leading to more impactful data over more areas than ever before.

Near Space Labs

As a stratospheric imagery provider, Near Space Labs have added the production high resolution, high frequency imagery to its collection of overhead imagery for clients. The partnership with Near Space Labs increases the collection of aerial imagery for properties from two to three times per year to monthly, or even daily in the event of a natural disaster such as flooding, wildfires or coastal storm surge.My colleague, Dr. Ben Tuttle, Ph.D., CTO of Arturo, shares our excitement, “Near Space Labs with their high-frequency observations and ability to include precise resolution is a great addition to our services. When a region or state is threatened by a natural disaster, we need to monitor properties in near real-time. Near Space Labs will help us be more responsive to our clients, whenever they need us.”

Satellite

Maxar Technologies

A trusted partner and innovator in Earth intelligence and space infrastructure, Maxar’s unique approach combines decades of deep mission understanding and a proven foundation of commercial technology to deliver solutions with unrivaled speed, scale, and cost effectiveness.

Aerial

Nearmap

Nearmap provides high resolution ortho and oblique imagery products across 70–75% of the US population, in addition to providing up-to-date and frequent coverage in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Accessing frequently captured aerial contents gives insurance providers the insights they need to make critical decisions across the entire policy lifecycle, from underwriting to renewal to claims and post-catastrophic events. With its recently introduced Grey Sky program, Nearmap is also helping manage post-catastrophic events.

Vexcel Imaging/GIC/Geomni

This partner offers state-of-the-art digital sensor systems and software solutions based on the latest and most-advanced technology. The comprehensive aerial camera portfolio provides a wide range of imaging capabilities from wide-area mapping (UltraCam Condor) to nadir (UltraCam Eagle & UltraCam Falcon) and oblique (UltraCam Osprey product line) camera systems. Vexcel Imaging provides high resolution blue and grey sky imagery across more than 76% of the US population with ortho and oblique coverage, in addition to providing post event imagery after a major peril event (‘grey sky’). Their GIC program seeks to capture approx. 500,000 sq.km per annum.

Aerometrex

An established, successful and professional aerial imaging and mapping company, with specialist expertise in photogrammetry, LiDAR, and 3D modelling, Aerometrex has built a very strong national and international reputation as a leading practitioner of these services. Aerometrex is known and trusted by government departments at all levels as well as major private sector corporations across a range of industries including insurance. We have also partnered with industry leaders American Family Insurance, Light Box, Nvidia, AWS, and Labelbox.

Why Partnerships Matter

To better service insurance carriers and enhance our technology—on-demand, deep learning models that derive accurate and current property characteristics via configurable APIs—we strive to create partnerships with the most innovative players in the market. We have come to recognize three core reasons why partnerships are important to our mission:

1. Realize Advanced Technology Capabilities

The real power of our partnerships is that now, insurance carriers can take advantage of the latest technology from providers that specialize in a particular field, such as satellite imagery, as it relates to valuing and pricing properties. The unique combination of utilizing multi-source imagery, coupled with Arturo’s unique application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, delivers the most trusted data available for insurance carriers. Now, from a single provider, our customers get the most accurate property analytics to make intelligent decisions, from quoting to claims to renewals. When it comes to our technology, Arturo’s proprietary insights are the result of our unique combination of feedback loops that continuously improve data models, access to American Family Insurance’s extensive history of claims and inspection data, and new analytics from our multi-source imagery partners. Through our partnerships, insurance carriers can reap the benefits of technology advancements across a number of providers, all in one place. Our partnerships offer the best property insights and technology you can’t find anywhere else.

2. Enable Efficient Investment Deployment

To meet specific data requirements, it may be tempting for insurance carriers to develop the technology they need in-house. While this might be an admirable act, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Recruiting the team and developing the technology is expensive, time consuming, and can be a major strain on internal resources. Plus, it isn’t core to the mission of insurance carriers.There are already some major technology and data providers that specialize in delivering the datasets insurance carriers require to assess risk and price properties. Our list of data partners is a testament to the expertise that already exists in the market. Why not take advantage of this innovation and expertise?Arturo’s technology, layered on top of the datasets we acquire from multi-source imagery partners, adds intelligence to enable our insurance customers to understand properties better. Now, our customers get the full picture on how commercial and residential properties have changed over time through temporal imagery or how a major weather event has impacted a portfolio with on-demand property insights. Carriers want to extract crucial information from imagery quickly and with regular currency. In other words, they want to see more “refresh”. It’s very difficult to accomplish proper coverage, accuracy, and speed, all from one provider, let alone internally. Arturo delivers “constant refresh” with temporal property insights through our partnerships. This means not only do you get the most current, up-to-date insights, but you can also select a specific timeframe against which to run an analysis. For example, you can obtain insights on a property today, before a catastrophic event a month prior and on the date you wrote the policy last year.The partnerships we have cultivated ensure that insurance carriers are investing their money efficiently. All from a single provider, you can now unlock the power of aerial imagery with predictive analytics and proprietary insights.

3. Develop Client-Centric Solutions

Lastly, our partnerships provide a different lens on key customer challenges as well as an enhanced way to solve these issues. Together with these leading providers, we develop new ways to solve client challenges by focusing on each provider’s expertise for a continuous innovation. As we better understand what our clients need, we evolve our product offerings, pushing the boundaries on what is possible for the insurance industry. As an example, one of our clients (one of Australia and New Zealand’s most recognized financial services companies) needed to select a property analytics provider that could deliver millions of property characteristics and conditions data across all urban centers and selected regional towns in Australia within forty-eight hours. We partnered with Aerometrex to provide the critical property characteristics. Our proprietary technology is designed to work with any imagery data provider, allowing Arturo to scale up infrastructure quickly to deliver the necessary data the insurance provider needed to build their pricing models. Arturo uploaded the client’s imagery, sourced from Aerometrex, into Arturo’s cloud optimized environment, aligning it with Arturo’s AI data services. Unlike any other insuretech provider, Arturo achieved a fully optimized instance to enable a fast turnaround to the client.

Final Thoughts on Partnerships

Arturo strives to push the insurance industry forward by taking a client-centric approach to solving challenges. By working with the best-in-class data partners, we set ourselves apart as the only provider to offer insurance carriers multi-source imagery across aerial, satellite, stratospheric, and ground. That is why we are constantly partnering with new, cutting-edge imagery providers to deliver the most complete and comprehensive property coverage possible. Partnerships enable our clients to better assess risk, identify property changes prior to renewal, and streamline quoting. If you’re interested in becoming a partner, you can contact us by sending an email to info@arturo.ai. Or, if you are an insurance carrier and are interested in Arturo’s AI property analytics solution, please request a demo here.