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Specialist insurer Beazley has launched a digital insurance policy that, for the first time ever, describes in plain English precisely what coverage the policyholder has bought.
Beazley Weather Guard protects event organizers against the effects of severe weather that may cause the cancellation of an outdoor event. It can also be used by retailers to insure weather-related sales promotions, linking a sales refund to an unusual weather event.
The language of the new digital policy, which can be easily accessed on a mobile device, describes precisely (and exclusively) the coverage purchased. The first sentence of each policy spells out the trigger for coverage, together with the sum insured in dollars (or other applicable currency) and any self-insured deductible.
“We wanted to give event organizers a simple but precise description of their coverage that they could access at a glance on a mobile phone,” said Beazley contingency underwriter Christian Phillips. “If you’ve bought a Beazley Weather Guard policy to protect your event against heavy snow, your digital policy will specify ‘snow’ and explain how many inches of snow will trigger coverage. If the covered peril is excessive heat or cold, your policy will explain how high or low the temperature needs to be to trigger coverage. It’s entirely personalized.”
Until now, all insurance policies have been paper or pdf documents comprising two main parts: an initial ‘declarations’ page summarizing the coverage purchased and a much longer, standard policy wording that shows all possible forms of available coverage, including coverage not purchased. Beazley has integrated the two parts of the Weather Guard policy into a personalized digital (HTML) document that is far shorter and easier to understand
“Insurers have generally struggled with plain English policy wordings,” said William Pitt, Beazley’s chief marketing officer. “Traditional policies are one-size-fits-all documents that describe every possible form of coverage the policyholder might have bought. To remind yourself of what you actually have bought, you have to constantly flick back to the declarations page.
“We asked ourselves: What would happen if all the information on the declarations page was instead integrated into the policy wording itself? When we did this, we found that it made the policy much easier to understand. Instead of “named insured,” we could insert the actual name of the policyholder. Instead of “sum insured,” we could insert a dollar amount. It all became much less abstract.”
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