Tropical storm Lee is making landfall in Louisiana as we speak. And as it happens, this event is unfolding on a Saturday. With With SpatialKey, a risk manager can quickly get an operational picture of this event and how it may impact locations of interest. She can do it right from a laptop at home. And she doesn’t need to call in a GIS specialist to prepare anything for her- she can do all of this on demand, based on the latest forecast data.

Here’s a video that shows just how simple it is…

In addition to being so easy to access and use, it’s easy to get started. We can have your organization up and running in minutes. Please contact us for more information about our solutions for insurance and risk management.

We’ve been tracking a sample insurance portfolio using the Hurricane Forecast App as Irene formed. On Thursday, two days ago, we reported that our forecasted exposure (in terms of total locations in the 50 knot windband) rose from 984 locations to 6,154 based on the updated NOAA forecasts, with total insured value rising from $152M to $1.6B.

Our forecasted exposure looks relatively similar to Thursday’s report: There are now 6,690 insured locations in the 50 knot band (either historical or forecasted) representing $1.7B in total insured value:

We can also now get a better sense of our insured locations in the 64 knot band, as forecasted by NOAA:

Irene mapped against our sample portfolio as of Wednesday evening.  NOAA is predicting Irene will hit the North Carolina coast.  Our sample portfolio has 984 locations within the 50 knot wind band, with a total insured value of almost $152M.

A zoomed in view shows the total insured value by zip code for our insured locations within the 50 knot wind band.  Users can easily drill into any zip to see record level detail.

As hurricanes form and forecasts are updated, insurers work feverishly to put the event in business context. What could this event mean to our customers? Our financial position? Our shareholders? More accurate and timely assessments- and the ability to quickly and effectively disseminate this information- mean better event response- to customers and to the financial community.

We’ve had the opportunity to interview insurance companies about their needs and observe their workflows while forecasting exposure as storms are in progress.  In short, we found the process, well… broken- and expensive.  There’s too much of a gap between the time when new event forecast information is made available by forecasters like NOAA and when business users have actionable information.  And, the amount of time spent manually loading data and compiling reports is significant.  Further, the output leaves lots to desired.  Most reports consist of emailed spreadsheets with tables, and perhaps static map images.  Requests for alternative analysis, or filtered views to meet different objectives, require even more time and precious analytical resources.  With forecasts changing multiple times per day, these processes completely consume IT and analysts, and leave the business underserved.

There’s a better way.

At SpatialKey, we’re leveraging the latest technology and great user experience design to provide users throughout the enterprise with more interactive, informative, contextual analysis of forecasted exposures related to hurricane – in a self-service model that provides information faster, with lower burden on the organization.

Here’s how it works.

Are you ready?

If you’d like to provide your business with more timely, intuitive, contextual, self-service exposure analysis capabilities while freeing up staff from time consuming report creation, contact us to learn how easily you can deploy SpatialKey’s Hurricane Forecast App throughout your organization.

NOAA Event Reports for tornado, wind, and hail for April 16.

A recent storm system passing through North Carolina included 62 tornadoes, one of them passing through downtown Raleigh. As weather events like these occur, insurers gear up to assess damage and plan event response. This includes proactively coordinating claims response as well as exploring financial impacts.

Increasingly, third party data – much of it in the public domain – has the potential to help organizations understand these events more quickly and completely. However, integrating these external feeds with internal data – like insured locations – has been a challenge for insurers. SpatialKey addresses this challenge, enabling insurers to quickly see, explore, and analyze event data in context with insured locations – and to distribute that insight throughout the organization.

Tornado Event Reports near Insured Locations in Raleigh, NC:
Within minutes of an event, insurers can see NOAA/NWS Event Reports in context with their insured locations.

NOAA’s National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center provides near real-time Storm Reports for tornado, hail, and wind reported by NWS offices. These reports are brief messages that include a time, a relatively precise location, and a brief comment. There were hundreds of Tornado Event Reports on April 16, with comments such as “Over 30 homes destroyed along with a Lowes” and “27 buildings … destroyed on Union Ridge Road…”

SpatialKey can automatically consume and present these NOAA Event Reports in near real time. SpatialKey users can see these events on an interactive map that also contains other locations of interest, like insured locations. They can quickly report on locations in proximity to events, and filter to see only specific events or locations.

Check out this short clip to see more about how this works:

In addition to these preliminary Event Reports, NOAA provides a wealth of data related to damaging weather – some of it going back decades – which can be leveraged to drive better decisions, from underwriting and rating to claims fraud detection. SpatialKey aids by making this data easier to visualize, analyze, and integrate with existing business data.

To learn more about how SpatialKey can provide more horsepower to your event analysis, reporting and damage assessment procedures, contact us today.

Did you know that half of our brain is hard wired for vision? Well what wakes the SpatialKey team up at night is that we want to create an application that leverages this crucial sense to its fullest potential. Human beings are visual thinkers, yet how come, in the business world, do we need to make so many critical decisions based on data that is presented in flat/non visual ways?

Our premise is that just because business decision makers have massive amounts of data doesn’t mean they can easily access its essential truths- truths that can reveal critical threats or opportunities that make/brake businesses. We need to see data represented in visual ways to quickly recognize patterns and understand complex events. Seeing that data visually allows us to ask better questions, get better feedback from others and ultimately get to the truths that give us the upper hand in decision making.

As a basic example: which format allows you to understand patterns better.

This?

Or this?

The answer is simple.

Spatialkey location intelligence software transforms static/flat row-and-column data into rich maps, reports, and visually interactive analytics that instantly reveal the truths business decision makers need. But instead of having to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars and months on implementation, SpatialKey is a cost effective and easy to use SaaS.

An audience that has recently discovered the business benefits of SpatialKey is the insurance industry. SpatialKey enables insurance analysts, underwriters, and brokers to finally use their wealth of geographical information to its fullest potential.

They can now bring together and visualize data about policies, claims, weather, terrain, geographical boundaries, and demographics. They can understand historical trends, current risks, and future opportunities in a more visual and interactive format. And ultimately, they are using the truths they discover to make decisions that maximize their bottom-line profitability.

For more information or to request a free trial- please contact us.

(CoreLogic provided the data displayed in this blog's images.)

SpatialKey changes all of that. Designed for hands-on use by the decision makers in your organization, the SaaS application breaks through barriers by giving insurers quick, easy-to-use data mapping and analysis capabilities—no programming or specialists required. Since there is no software to install or maintain, SpatialKey deploys instantly and can be used for a fraction of the cost of traditional GIS and location intelligence systems. And it complements the systems you already have in place.

With SpatialKey, you can bring in data from many sources and instantly visualize it on a map. Then you can analyze and report on your data on the fly to better understand patterns and correlations between policies, perils, demographics, and other factors. Ultimately, you’ll make decisions about capital management, underwriting, pricing, sales, and marketing that immediately benefit the bottom line.

Available either out-of-the-box or customized to meet your company’s specific needs, SpatialKey helps you realize the full potential of your insurance data without substantial system investment.

Use Cases:

* Manage risk exposure: In order to remain profitable and comply with government regulations, you’re constantly managing and monitoring risk exposure. SpatialKey provides highly interactive analysis of geographic data, allowing you to properly assess reinsurance protection needs.

* Catastrophic and large-scale event management: SpatialKey enables you to better assess and respond to large claim events such as floods and hurricanes. For example, import hurricane path data to assess probabilistic loss estimates. See how the event will affect local portfolio-holding exposure, and manage response resources accordingly.

* Maximize sales and marketing opportunities: By providing deeper insight into local demographic and policy characteristics, SpatialKey helps you develop more targeted marketing campaigns that deliver higher returns than traditional, blanket campaigns.

For more information or to start a new trial, please contact us

To further engage the local community and to encourage dynamic critiques – ArtPrize uses an online application created by Universal Mind based on the SpatialKey platform in its central “The Hub” located in the Old Federal Building. Using SpatialKey, local visitors can not only access maps to see which art piece is being displayed where, but they can also instantly access geotagged tweets, Facebook comments, or photos posted on social media sites about art pieces or artists. SpatialKey also tracks viewers making their way through the exhibition, making it easy for visitors to see what art is “hot” in a specific location.

(Photo from Rex Larsen- Grand Rapids Press)

Want to participate in the vote? Click here.

Want to see how you can gain invaluable insight into your data using SpatialKey? Check us out here.

With SpatialKey’s SaaS platform, insurers can now finally bring together and analyze *on-the-fly* – not in hours or days as with other tools- a variety of data coming from different sources, and make immediate business decisions accordingly.

Take tropical storm Alex, expected to turn into a hurricane (thankfully heading away from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill) this Wednesday as an example. Since some of the predictive hurricane models are proprietary, we decided to use publicly available datasets of the hurricane’s path at http://www.hurricanezone.net/#01l, as well as a mock sample of insurance policy to showcase how easy it was to import and analyze information using SpatialKey.

After downloading a shapefile containing the Tropical Storm ALEX 5-Day Track here, we easily imported it into SpatialKey and created a new report showing the potential 72 and 120 hour paths of the storm.

Tropical Storm ALEX 5-Day Track, Uncertainty Cone

Next we added our fictitious insurance company’s policy data and overlayed it with the predictive hurricane’s path. This allowed us to see in minutes, not days or hours, which policies in which geographies might be affected by Alex. Minutes vs days make a big difference- the quicker the information gets in the hands of decision makers within the insurance company, the quicker they can adjust their plans- for example where to dispatch local agents after a natural disaster.

Tropical Storm ALEX 5-Day Track with Policy files

SpatialKey shines by making complex data analysis simple and available to the people who need it the most.

Tropical Storm ALEX 5-Day Track with Policy files filtered

Within just a few minutes, no programming or analysts required, we imported the insurance policy data from a spreadsheet, shape files from the NOAA site and used the capabilities of SpatialKey to filter which policies could potentially be affected by the path of the storm. We could take this analysis further and forecast the impact of the storm on commercial vs home policies or per construction type. We could even import additional datasets, for example local demographics, for further insight. The analysis capabilities are endless. And the other benefit of SpatialKey is that the information (for example which policies are at the highest risk) can easily then be exported out of SpatialKey and shared within the organization for follow up. Or interactive reports containing the information above can be shared so that others on the team can further slice and dice it according to their analysis needs.

To find out how SpatialKey can help your insurance company, please visit here or contact us.

The great news is that analytical capabilities previously limited to larger companies with deep pockets are now available to a broader range of organizations. Plus, even larger companies are benefiting from new SaaS and cloud-based technologies that allow easier access to data often locked in legacy systems. More and more companies can therefore take a proactive approach to their decision making, an approach based on facts, vs the reactive approaches of the past.

Police report

Take law enforcement. When SpatialKey first launched, we immediately received interest from police departments looking into better approaches to crime fighting. Most already used sophisticated RMS or CompStat data systems, yet those systems did not take into account data from other systems or outside sources. For example gang data might be in one database, crime incidents in RMS, and offender information in a spreadsheet with no easy way to pull the information together to make better policing decisions. What they saw in SpatialKey was a way to get a better ROI on their investments by adding new dimensions to their data analysis capabilities.

With SpatialKey, a commander for example can bring in data from multiple sources and start looking for patterns: there are a string of robberies happening in a neighborhood- how can we curtail these? Who are the parolees or known offenders living within x miles of that area? Is there a specific time of the day that these crimes occur? In the police world, they call this Intelligence-led policing- the ability to leverage intelligence to guide crime fighting decisions. So if the commander sees a pattern in the time when crimes occur, increasing the number of patrol cars in the neighborhood at that time is a fact-based approach that hopefully will generate faster/cheaper results. And all it took was a couple minutes of analysis with SpatialKey vs randomly patrolling the area.

Well data is data is data. What we’ve seen in the past year is that a Sales VPs’ data analysis needs are actually not that different from a police chief’s (or any other decision maker for that matter). At the end of the day, what’s important for organizations is to find ways to pull together information critical to decision making and make it available to the people who need to actually make those decisions. So for one parolees, crime logs, or calls for service are key data points to look into to make fact-based decisions, for the other it might be sales leads, product sales, customer calls or customer demographics. And of course the types of data SpatialKey clients need to analyze is as varied as their industries.

The common thread we’ve found amongst all of our clients is that although they already have data analysis capabilities (most already use some form of BI or GIS system), those systems do not provide them the ad-hoc, “get the answer now” data analysis needs the addition of SpatialKey provides.

So although a Sales VP might be using Salesforce as a great CRM tool, there is no easy way to tie the salesforce data to other internal or external data sources to make better decisions to maximize sales opportunities. By incorporating SpatialKey with Salesforce, he/she can now bring in demographic information or competitive data into the picture. Are there patterns, geographic or otherwise, that can help guide sales staff deployment or lead closing activities? Is there a correlation between deal size and marketing activities? What works best to close leads in this geography vs the other?

In a fast-paced world when we all need an answer yesterday, the benefit they see in SpatialKey is that not only can they leverage knowledge they never had before, but they also don’t need to wait on data analysis gurus to get answers. They can do that analysis themselves- on the fly. Many actually use SpatialKey in meetings so that “what if” questions can be answered immediately. Maybe we should call this Intelligence-led sales…..

Please visit spatialkey.com for more information. We also offer a free trial if you want to take a spin of the app with your own data.