Personalised weather insurance launched
Specialist global insurer Beazley has announced the launch of a new digital weather insurance policy.
The insurer claims that, for the first time ever, the policy ‘describes in plain English’ exactly what coverage the policyholder can expect. The policy, Beazley Weather Guard, has been designed to protect organisers of events against the threat of weather that might lead to an event being cancelled; it can also apply to retailers who may need to insure weather-related promotions, linking refunds to unusual weather events.
“We wanted to give event organisers a simple but precise description of their coverage that they could access at a glance on a mobile phone,” said Contingency Underwriter Christian Phillips. “If you've bought a Beazley Weather Guard policy to protect your event against heavy snow, your digital policy will specify 'snow' and explain how many inches of snow will trigger coverage. If the covered peril is excessive heat or cold, your policy will explain how high or low the temperature needs to be to trigger coverage. It’s entirely personalised.”
Generally, insurance policies come with paper or PDF documentation that comprises two parts – the ‘declarations’ page, which summarises coverage, and lengthy standard policy wording that details all possible and available coverage, often far beyond that which has been purchased. Beazley says that the wording of its new policy is much simpler, describing exclusively the coverage that has been purchased.
“Insurers have generally struggled with plain English policy wordings,” said William Pitt, Chief Marketing Officer at Beazley. “We asked ourselves: what would happen if all the information on the declarations page was instead integrated into the policy wording itself? When we did this, we found that it made the policy much easier to understand ... it all became much less abstract.”