Live data from Hacker News

Flock raises £2.25M for on-demand drone insurance

techcrunch.com

1–10 of 14 posts

Re: Flock raises £2.25M for on-demand drone insurance

#5
post #4

Will be interesting to see if they can apply this to other markets. You'd think if they could quantify the risk for flying robots then they'd be able to do it for anything.

First off, a disclaimer. I am Abe, and I lead the engineering team at Flock.

With that out of the way, yes, our algorithmic risk assessments leverage real-time data to identify real time, geospatial risk. It is absolutely our long term vision to use this to make insurance generally more fair, easy to use, and, yes, cost effective to both the insurers and the insured. In pursuit of this goal, we are currently working with other insurers to identify whether our core technology can be used in other industries.

Re: Flock raises £2.25M for on-demand drone insurance

#8
What is the societal value of adding more (and real-time) data to insurance?

In general, insurance helps spread risk. This means that if something drastically bad happens we distribute the impact over a larger population reducing the individual impact.

In the extreme if you perfectly assess risk insurance ceases to have any value. The insurance costs would perfectly reflect the risk and there would be no benefit to owning insurance.

My hunch is that this kind of data driven insurance could help people avoid risky situations. But I’m not sure that’s a given and it seems like there are many downsides (particularly if the risk is unavoidable).

I’d be interested in perspectives on this.

Re: Flock raises £2.25M for on-demand drone insurance

#9
post #8

What is the societal value of adding more (and real-time) data to insurance? In general, insurance helps spread risk. This means that if something drastically bad happens we distribute the impact over a larger population reducing the individual impact. In the extreme if you perfectly assess risk insurance ceases to have any value. The insurance costs would perfectly reflect the risk and there would be no benefit to o…

"My hunch is that this kind of data driven insurance could help people avoid risky situations." That's the ideal. The cheapest accident to pay for is the one that doesn't happen.

It's all about aligning incentives. The win-win dynamic is that the insurer can certify training courses, licensing, product design, etc. Customers can get discounts for making safer choices.

Selection effects can be more adversarial. e.g. You get dropped after the first incident. The people who would benefit the most from coverage can't get it. People with poor credit scores get discriminated against even in the absence of activity specific bad history.

Obviously as you mentioned perfect discrimination causes the system to break down. Risky customers can't get covered while safe customers don't buy because their risk is infinitesimal.

Post reply on HN