Following its initial involvement with the Lloyd’s Lab, Value.Space was able to develop its existing, highly cost-effective structural survey tool for infrastructure owners, powered by satellite data, and launch it into the global insurance market. The ability to make detailed structural health checks for infrastructure assets is now accessible to a broad range of carriers.
Previous Lab experience
The genesis of what Value.Space offers today was realised in cohort four of the Lloyd's Lab, in early 2020. The company was paired with mentors including an underwriter, a risk engineer, and a financial controller, who supplied use cases that helped define the specific challenges faced by insurers when assessing the structural integrity of large infrastructure assets. Value.Space then tailored its offering for insurers, to provide a survey tool that was faster, more accurate and more cost efficient than any they had used before.
Addressing the liability protection gap
Following cohort four, Value.Space had an effective solution for infrastructure property risks, developed in concert with the insurance industry. However, as word-of-mouth spread about their solution, they became aware of another pressing concern for infrastructure insurers.
Alongside the global protection gap for uninsured catastrophe losses - which for 2022 was estimated by Swiss Re at $151bn - there is a huge liability protection gap that is less well-documented.
In addition to prospective property losses, what insurers want to understand about the risk of breaches at dams or tailing storage facilities, is the dollar amount of potential liability claims from these events. Until now, these have proved difficult to calculate.
Re-discovering the benefits of the Lloyd’s Lab
It was to solve this issue that Value.Space returned to the Lloyd’s Lab in cohort 10.
One of the major benefits of working on this problem in the Lab was the ability to shape a liability model with constant feedback from the industry.
As with the property model, the ability to carry out portfolio assessments across hundreds of assets, would be prohibitively expensive if done manually. The Value.Space survey tool is ten times faster than manual alternatives, and 25 times more cost-efficient.
The analysis produced also enables insurers to adjust their risk-based pricing, drive remediation processes, improve their combined operating ratio, and take control of their loss ratio for liability exposures.
New risk profiles
Since completing the tenth cohort of Loyd’s Lab, Value.Space has begun to consider new and unique risk profiles emerging as a consequence of climate change. Rising temperatures and increased rainfall are creating soil conditions that increase the risk of subsidence, placing a greater strain on large infrastructure assets, but also raising exposure levels for other property types.
There is a growing need among insurers for a survey tool to assess property and liability exposures for specific assets across a range of sectors, and to measure the growth of those exposures across portfolios. The timing, for Value.Space and Lloyd’s, couldn’t be more appropriate.
“In terms of the liability model, there is big advantage for the market in being able to understand the risk profile of a dam or a mine really quickly, and in giving a better estimate of what the contract is going to cost the insured. Brokers can now check the rate that is being applied very quickly, which means the insured is getting coverage quicker, and the broker gets the business quicker, which is creating more enduring relationships with buyers.”Reijo Pold, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer
Explore all our alumni
Learn about all our alumni who have take part in the Lloyd’s Lab Accelerator programme.