News & Events

Media Contacts:

Tom Francoeur
Topaz Partners
781.404.2405

Robert Halpern
Marketing Director, Enservio
508.318.6038

Articles:

Hot Insurance Tech Companies To Watch In 2010
By Ellen Carney, Senior Analyst
Forrester Research, December 21, 2009

Enservio helps P&C insurers answer a question that many make hunches to determine: What’s the value of what’s inside the structures that they’re insuring? Enservio provides the P&C market with the means to inventory, value, replace, and benchmark the contents of residential and commercial structures and businesses. The company has built a like, kind, quality (LKQ) database that captures the price of items like furniture, clothing, and even pizza ovens from a variety of sources and then validates these prices daily. The database also means that Enservio can push analytics to carriers for a variety of operational, productivity, financial, and content benchmarks. Its RestoreMall service lets carriers provide claimants with a co-branded debit card in the amount of their settlement that can be used at Enservio’s RestoreMall Web site that leverages mass buying power. That means that carriers don’t have to reimburse based on the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Did the claimant lose a vintage Martin F5 mandolin in the fire or tornado? No problem. The company’s EnservioSelect service brings in specialists, including appraisers from the PBS Antiques Roadshow television series, to provide pre- and post-loss services and even conservation and restoration. In addition to its residential contents valuation service, Enservio is targeting commercial insurers underwriting the small business market and is about to launch a commercial contents valuation service.

Why it’s important - In the US last year, there were 1.5 million fires that accounted for $15.5 billion in losses.6 Content loss in all fires averaged more than $17,000 in 2002, while confined fires, those that don’t include major physical loss or damage such as a stovetop fire, had an average content loss of $1,600. Multiply these losses by the number of other natural and manmade disasters, and the value of homeowner possessions and commercial equipment quickly adds up to billions. Unlike the fairly standardized data available for vehicle claims, the billions of different items that fill US households make ascribing a value to the banal bits of life, like a pair of socks and a bath towel or the more treasured artifacts like a painting, daunting for the claims adjuster. And unless something really stuck out, carriers found it easier to pay out what the home or business owner claimed as lost content. Enservio’s LKQ database now provides a mechanism to help carriers rein in claims leakage because they can now more accurately value an item’s worth. Adjuster productivity is improved since with one call to Enservio, both household and hard-to-value items can be valued.

Taming Contents Claims
By Jon McNeill
Claims Magazine, November 2009

To the detriment of consumers, claim adjusters, and the carriers themselves, it’s still the wild, wild West when it comes to current practices and processes for handling contents claims....