Founded in 2010, CoreLogic has established itself as a leading provider of location and property intelligence, with more than 500 insurers and reinsurers now using its products.
Mick Noland, General Manager for Insurance, joins Matthew to discuss the company’s growth over the last decade and the unique data sets that CoreLogic is creating for its insurance clients.
The conversation also covers recent investment in CoreLogic, how the company integrates with third-party providers, and the development of data and insights for catastrophe modelling and climate change risks.
Talking points include:
- How insurers are using real estate data
- Building a data-led approach to underwriting
- Establishing unique identifiers for individual properties
- The benefits of using platforms and APIs
- The growth and importance of climate change risk information
More information on CoreLogic’s Digital Hub Alliance is available here on the company’s website.
CoreLogic was named as one of the companies to watch in our Location Intelligence 2021 report, which is available to download from our website.
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Continuing Professional Development – Learning Objectives
InsTech London is accredited by The Chartered Insurance Institute (CII). By listening to an InsTech London podcast, or reading the accompanying transcript, you can claim up to 0.5 CPD hours towards the CII member CPD scheme.
The Learning Objectives for this podcast are:
- Understand the value of property data in the insurance industry
- Realise how a data provider can differentiate the different buildings in a dataset
- Recognise how property data can intersect with climate change
To continue learning about property data in insurance, read our insight US Property Data: Is this as good as it gets?
Let us know you have listened to this podcast and if your organisation is a member of InsTech London you will receive a quarterly summary of the CPD hours you have earned.
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The digital hub for property data – Episode 148 highlights
Matthew: You have a lot of experience within insurance. In your view, what are the needs of the industry?
Mick: I started in this industry – I studied Economics at the University of Chicago, and after graduating I worked at Nationwide Insurance. For an industry that is so flush with data, most of the business decisions we were making were not data driven. It was very anecdotal and biased. I felt better decisions could be made using objective methods. My journey over the last 25 years has involved leveraging data and using it to make better business decisions.
Matthew: For those that are not familiar with the company, what does CoreLogic do?
Mick: The heart of CoreLogic is its real estate assets in the US. Seven or eight years ago, we thought about the adjacent areas where data could be used to make better decisions. The insurance industry made a lot of sense, and that was the genesis of some of CoreLogic’s early acquisitions. These include EQECAT, Marshall & Swift/Boeckh, Myriad and Symbility. All acquisitions have been property-related insurance and workflow platform companies. We break these down into underwriting workflows, claims workflows and risk management.
Matthew: What value do insurers get from real estate data?
Mick: The process of underwriting in property insurance used to be highly broker driven. Many companies were applying a lot of manual underwriting effort. Today, accurate data that has been acquired through other processes can be used for underwriting. The data is accurate because lenders are making significant mortgage decisions based on it.
Matthew: How would you characterise the data that is available to mortgage lenders versus what insurers have?
Mick: There are holes in any data set. It’s important to understand where those holes are so that the data can be augmented. That’s what we offer with CoreLogic’s data assets. Real estate data is not always perfect, but it’s valuable when augmented with other data sets that CoreLogic and our insurance clients possess.
Matthew: What does CoreLogic do to ensure that its data is up to date?
Mick: There are a lot of data sets that age very quickly – for example, two years for a property image is a long time. That’s why it’s so important to have multiple data sources. With multiple data sources, we can ensure that the most up to date information is available.
By offering API integrations to our clients, they gain access to all of the data that we have across our assets and all of our partners’ assets.
Matthew: How is CoreLogic starting to help uniquely identify buildings and their characteristics?
Mick: We have a proprietary unique identifier for US properties. We can then tag all of the data attributes for properties and can layer in all the attributes for that unique identifier.
Matthew: Which companies are you working with?
Mick: We have a significant number of partners, including Google. Our Digital Hub Alliance consists of over 100 companies and is growing. We want to create a holistic platform for our clients to plug into – we believe in an open architected environment.
Matthew: CoreLogic offers some unique data sets – can you talk about your one for floods?
Mick: In the US, we are partnered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Evaluating flood risk is difficult – it can be an intensive manual process and the peril changes over time. At CoreLogic, we provide an automated digital solution where we can provide very specific readings for FEMA. Through our data, we’ve been able to model what the ground floor (or “1st storey” in the US) elevation of a building is.
Matthew: What is CoreLogic doing to help banks and insurers to understand and manage their climate change risk?
Mick: Climate change has been at the fore in the insurance industry for 10 or 15 years. A big change is that financial services companies are now realising how important it is for them to understand climate risk and exposure. There is strong demand to understand, for example, exposure of a mortgage portfolio. CoreLogic has worked with many companies and several government agencies to help them quantify and understand what these risks look like.
Matthew: Are you doing anything to help with remote claims assessment?
Mick: There’s a lot of manual work in the claims process. Our claims platform, Claims Connect, helps lower expenses, provides more accuracy and the ability to adjudicate losses all the way through the cycle. The insurer’s client can then have significantly faster cycle times, from loss to repair and closure of the claim.
Matthew: What does Stone Point’s recent investment in CoreLogic mean for the company?
Mick: Stone Point was founded through Marsh, so they have roots in the insurance industry. They have been an amazing partner so far – they are focused on growing the value of our business, and therefore value to our clients.
Matthew: Who should people contact to find out more about what you’re doing?
Mick: Reach out to me directly. I would love to talk to anyone who’s interested in learning more about CoreLogic or just talking about the industry in general. I have a passion for insurance.