Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance was recognized with the Claims Initiative of the Year - Japan

It has maximized AI and satellite imaging for a better grasp of damage situations and quicker payment of insurance claims.

Japan has historically been affected by natural disasters, even having increased scale and frequency in recent years. These have led people to more frequent insurance claims in the aftermath of any natural disasters.

Large-scale natural disasters brought by typhoons Faxai and Hagibis in 2019 have led to industry-wide insurance claims related to natural disasters exceeding ¥1t ($9.05b), which included around ¥330b ($2.98b) in claims to Tokio Marine Group. Also, around 22,000 employees were mobilized from all over Japan to handle the regions affected by the series of natural disasters in fiscal 2019.

Given the increased severity of these calamities, Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance (TMNF) has taken up an urgent task to make efforts and utilize advanced technologies to support its affected customers and focused on accelerating the claims processing and payments, having an broader aim to deliver safety and security to all its customers. 

Amongst TMNF’s initiatives to meet this goal, there is an initiative to employ satellite imagery and perform remote damage assessment to reduce the resource movement and enable quick insurance payments. 

In this initiative advanced technologies have been deployed such as visual light imagery, image analysis technology and along with synthetic aperture radar (SAR),which has advantage of being able to operate at night and through clouds to process details of damage with inundation height and damage area details. 

Employing these state-of-the-art technologies allowed TMNF to achieve a more precise and wider area detection of damage range and inundation height, expediting the goal of faster processing of claims settlements with the analysis provided to damage investigators in making their decisions. 

This has been maximized in July 2020 when several rivers flooded due to heavy rains. Tokio Marine used satellite imagery and AI to quickly ascertain affected regions, damage to buildings, and floor depths to ensure timely guidance and quick claims payment to affected customers.

The mission-driven use of such technologies resulted in a significant reduction in the processing time for flood damages, from two to three weeks and such, lessen the need for human intervention to check the said damages.

TMNF going beyond their responsibility to create a more disaster-resistant society has allowed them to stand out and win the Claims Initiative of the Year - Japan at the Insurance Asia Awards 2021. The prestigious award recognizes cutting-edge innovations and its impact to the industry, as well as the project’s ability to be flexible and progressive.