On the heels of a rebrand, Cotality, formerly CoreLogic, is developing several new innovative solutions for climate-based risks, an executive has told Insurance Business.
The firm announced a new brand identity, logo, and tagline earlier this year, signifying its intent to grow beyond being a financial services provider focused on the mortgage industry to a leader in property information, data and analytics.
“It’s a bold new direction for the company,” said Garret Gray (pictured), president of insurance solutions at Cotality. “This new brand is a reflection of the changes that we’ve made.”
For the insurance side, this shift is particularly meaningful. Cotality has been focusing on the “people beyond the buildings,” Gray said, “not just the policyholders but also the people using our workflow tools.”
Leveraging property data more effectively is central to Cotality’s game plan. One recent initiative involves using voice and image to simplify property assessments.
The tool allows property professionals to inspect a property, describe what they’re seeing and take images, then turn that data into an estimate, Gray explained. The idea is to cut friction, reduce manual input, and shift focus back to the policyholder.
Another is a new wildfire risk scoring system that accounts for how buildings can become fuel sources during wildfires. This was developed and accelerated after the Los Angeles wildfires.
Gray said the devastating event in January helped them uncover a new understanding of how fire spreads in urban areas. “Our industry has not really factored that in before into risk scores,” he said.
After witnessing similar patterns in Lahaina, the team accelerated development. But implementing this required granular data. “In order to give an accurate conflagration score, you have to have all the different details of every building in every area that you’re scoring and modeling,” Gray said.
The changing nature of climate risk is pushing the company to look beyond wildfires. Hail and severe convective storms are becoming a growing concern in insurance, with severe convective storms accounting for $64 billion, or 41% of the total global insured losses from natural catastrophes in 2024, according to Gallagher Re.
“Hail is tricky because damage isn’t always immediately visible,” Gray said. “A storm might hit today and cause little damage, but maybe two years ago a different storm caused significant damage that was never repaired. Insurers may be paying out now for damage from older, uncovered events.”
To address this, Cotality is developing a hail damage analysis tool that helps insurers determine whether current storm damage actually occurred in the recent event, if damage is from previous uncovered events, and the precise timing of potential damage.
These solutions use advanced property data, weather forensics, and AI to provide quick, accurate insights.
By June, Cotality aims to refresh all its global catastrophe peril models. It is bringing more artificial intelligence into the estimating process, such as its voice-to-image-to-scope tool Gray described. But he also teased an AI function that can predict the next set of line items in an estimate, improving both speed and accuracy for property professionals.
The firm is also bringing large language models (LLMs) to its users. “Think of ChatGPT, but having direct access to all of your data,” Gray said. At the center of this is what Cotality calls human-centric innovation.
“If you look at all the tools that we’re putting out, they’re all about making people’s lives easier,” Gray said.
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