Boosting agricultural insurance based on earth observation data
To objective of the BEACON project is to develop a commercial service package that will enable insurance companies to exploit the untapped market potential of Agricultural Insurance, taking advantage of innovations in Earth Observation, weather intelligence and ICT / blockchain technology. BEACON will enable insurance companies to alleviate the effect of weather uncertainty when estimating risk for Agricultural Insurance products, reduce the number of on-site visits for claim verification, reduce operational and administrative costs for monitoring of insured indexes and contract handling, and design more accurate and personalized contracts. Through an early warning service they will be able to inform their customers (farmers) for potential crop risks related with weather conditions, and advise them to take all the necessary actions to mitigate the impact of weather in their crops. EO data derived by Copernicus Sentinel missions as well as by missions contributing to Copernicus will be used to develop the data products that will act as a complementary source to the information used by insurance companies to design their products and assess natural disasters. Weather intelligence based on data assimilation, numerical weather prediction and ensemble seasonal forecasting will be used to verify the occurrence of a catastrophic weather event and to predict future perils. ICT / blockchain technology will be used for the smart contract service, to provide insurance companies with an automated method for paying out damages to insured parties. The BEACON services will be deployed in the operational environment of more than 10 companies in the insurance sector, openly demonstrating and validating its value proposition and acceptance as a marketable commercial solution. A business model will be developed and validated using the Lean Start-up methodology, and a global roll-out of BEACON will be designed.