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Earthquake and Hope…

Earthquake damage to building

We are following the recent earthquake in Puerto Rico where around 2/3rds of the people remain without electricity (9th Jan 2020), many also still don’t have water and frightened residents were staying outside as a series of aftershocks rocked the island following a magnitude 6.4 earthquake. This is from CNN reporting and our hearts go out to these people, many of them who are still recovering from hurricane Maria some two years ago.

CNN is reporting that many say it is worse than Maria, some say Residents and officials have repeatedly said the impact from the quakes surpasses the devastation that Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm when it hit the island, delivered two years ago.

“With the hurricane, you knew when and at what time it would arrive,” Guayanilla resident Tatiana Rodriguez, 28, said, adding of the quakes, “This, you don’t know at what time it’s going to happen.”

The town of 18,000 located near the southern coast hasn’t been getting regular updates, she said. Residents are disinclined to leave their homes because they don’t know what areas are safe. Rodriguez worries that recovery will be difficult, especially for those hit hard by Maria, she said.

The earthquakes comes after Hurricane Maria devastated the US territory in September 2017. Many in southern Puerto Rico said the earthquakes’ damage was worse. “There’s no warnings for this,” Puerto Rico Police Commissioner Henry Escalera said of the earthquakes. “A hurricane gives us time to plan ahead.”

The Magnitude 6.4 quake was the biggest in a large number of tremors and quakes. Hundred have been felt over the last month or two and each time it must be hard to know where it’s leading.

Even the best warning systems for earthquakes can only give a few seconds warning to people. So planning is key.

This is where insurance should be kicking in. We know people don’t like to buy insurance and insurance can be expensive. In the end of the day Insurance is not ‘aid’. It is more like a saving plan for when things go wrong. Insurance should be a community project. However costs are sometimes too expensive for many and this can also be reflective in the likelihood of the issue such as Hurricane etc.

Additionally insurance is often seen as not paying out. There are so many clauses and exclusions that for an average person it can complicated and the rules behind making a claim can daunting.

What is MIC Global doing about the threat from Earthquake?

Our approach to insurance products for earthquakes is new and innovative. We are developing a Parametric approach to our products. This means that our products are directly tied to the initial reports and will be triggered for automatic payout when an insured property is affected.

The parametric approach is a way to simplify the insurance process and build cover around the claim. It is based on a set of known rules and when these are triggered, the insurance pays out.

Our vision fully supports our clients growth ambitions by limiting the impact of our services on their processes, whilst delivering essential insurance cover for their customers.

At MIC Global we are focused on changing the way business insurance is developed and processed. We are insurance with AI built in with API’s. We are in the forefront of that change; developing policies by the season, job, by the hour, by the day and by the Km, thus fitting our model to that of the platforms and the way small and micro businesses see risk. We are unbundling business policies so that the cover offered fits with peoples and business needs or the actual job or process being undertaken. Making Business Insurance transactional.

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