IE mag had a chat with Dr Sakthy Selvakumaran, a Chartered Civil Engineer at BKwai recently, to learn more about property asset values, data handling and pricing risk. One of the most useful tools for insurance brands is modern satellite imagery, which is highly detailed and offers a constantly evolving database of the built environment.
1. How does BKwai monitor and protect high-value assets?
The built environment has a critical role both in climate change mitigation, as well as protecting society from the impacts of it. BKwai’s advanced machine learning tools make sense of the huge amount of sensor, space, environmental and historical data available that normally overwhelms organisations, and can identify trends within the data to accurately predict and forecast disruptive and costly future events.
As a sensor agnostic software platform, BKwai collects data from all types of sensors and sources – including high-tech satellites – to intelligently predict issues and defects before they occur. The insights gleaned from our data analysis serves to protect high-value assets far more effectively than a sporadic visual inspection, which could typically takes place once over a period of several years.
When periodic assessments are conducted on critical assets in this way, there are long periods where issues can arise – and it is often too late by the time they find a problem.
Companies waste a lot of money trying to fix things and figure out what happened and WHY – whether it’s structural defect or a landslip – with this lack of insight putting both the public and infrastructure at additional risk if we can’t see whether it will happen again. By contrast, we make use of new data sets from high-tech sources, such as satellites, to look back carefully over the past ten years. This serves to illustrate how the asset or the ground has moved much more objectively and, when combined with other environmental datasets, allows engineering teams to determine whether assets are behaving normally or are heading towards potential problems. Preventative action can then be taken, proving much more affordable and effective than reactive measures alone.
2. How does your company’s work benefit insurance providers?
By enabling teams to address potential issues and defects in structures and the ground before they develop into a fully blown problem, BKwai prevents insurance companies from having to pay out to remediate something that has gone wrong. The insights it can provide
into the future of any protected assets or infrastructure can also help to determine adequate level of coverage, helping asset owners and operators to better manage their own level of risk. Climate change is increasingly putting assets at risk, and we want to support those that manage assets be more resilient.
3. Do you think insurance companies are fully utilising cutting-edge tech such as sensors, satellites and data analysis? If not, what are the hurdles that stops them from doing so?
There’s a spectrum of people making use of new datasets and people who are yet to learn about them. The insurance sector has become much better at accessing multiple datasets, leveraging platforms to layer their data. Nevertheless, having access to layers of data does not necessarily mean they’re deriving value from it. So, insurance companies must learn to find relevant insights, using the data at their fingertips for forecasting purposes. The challenge is not accessing data, but having the right tools to find value within it.
4. Do you envisage insurance providers utilising satellite data in real time, so notifications of problems can be issued in apps, insurer messaging services and local media, etc?
Compared to the current scenario of visually inspecting assets once every few years, there’s certainly room to improve. But the use of the term ‘real time’ when referring to data can be quite challenging. Yes, sensors and satellites are making frequent data collection much easier, but in the case of satellites the acquisitions come in an interval of every few days, and soon after it becomes available, we can quickly process that data and put it out. Nevertheless, these vastly improved capabilities make a world of difference when it comes to making timely, intelligent predictions – making them media key tool in early warning and preventative rather than reactive actions.
5. How will advancements in satellite technology and data analysis transform the future landscape of asset insurance and risk management?
It’s a really exciting sector, because we’re getting more and more data, with better spatial resolution, at increasingly lower cost. Many satellite companies are launching new satellites as well, which will really see data capabilities go up. In terms of data analysis, then, the challenge is finding value in this wealth of information.
BKwai builds on R&D from the University of Cambridge (as a research spin out) to handle all kinds of challenges that may stand in the way of that, from data being collected in different timeframes in different modes of data, to spot patterns among the noise. Those two things together – data wealth and analytics capabilities – have the potential to transform the future landscape.
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