Munich Re drone partnership in line with tech aspirations

Munich Re has partnered with San Francisco drone firm Betterview to offer clients drone imagery, analysis and reporting.

The partnership is in line with Munich Re’s aspirations to fully utilise the quickly evolving capabilities of insurtech by tapping into startups.

Speaking exclusively to Global Reinsurance, Munich Re global clients and North America chief executive Chris Fuhrmann explained that the firm was investing significant manpower in keeping abreast of insurtech startups.

Fuhrmann said: “Currently, we have a senior executive of Munich Re in nearly every innovation hub around the world. Their only task is to liaise with startup and tech companies in order to find out what they develop and how we can utilise it – either to become better on the product side, or more efficient as far as our own processes are concerned.”

He added: “Startups are very often run by very bright people, but they struggle with the content. The good thing is we have good and explicit knowledge about insurance content, and if you bring out stuff together with people who successfully launch startups, we are really in a win-win situation. We learn how to work in a more agile environment, and we combine both areas of expertise.”

”…we believe that their commitment to creating value for the insurance industry really sets them apart from their competitors in the drone space…”

Tim Brockett

Betterview, which was launched in 2014, has successfully inspected over 15,000 properties for over 90 insurance clients. As part of the agreement, Munich re will refer clients that can benefit from drone-related data and analysis on to Betterview.

Munich Re senior vice president Tim Brockett said: “Not only are we impressed with Betterview’s technical capabilities, we believe that their commitment to creating value for the insurance industry really sets them apart from their competitors in the drone space, delivering high-level data, analysis and insights into buildings and properties.”

Betterview co-founders David Lyman and Dave Tobias said in a joint statement: “With the close of our series seed funding round in September, Betterview is uniquely positioned to meet the evolving needs of Munich Re’s clients.”

They added: “This expansion has allowed us to focus on broadening our machine learning/computer vision capabilities, enhancing our software platform, creating new partnerships, as well as launching a soon to be released version two of our mobile application.”