In the ever-evolving world of catastrophe risk management, staying ahead of the curve requires more than just traditional scoring models. Enter Property Guardian, a groundbreaking suite of capabilities that offers comprehensive, real-time insights into wildfire risk.
We sat down with Brian Bastian, the Head of Product for Green Shield’s Property Guardian, to discuss how this innovative tool is redefining the way underwriters, insurers, and property owners approach risk assessment and mitigation. With a wealth of experience in B2B SaaS, spatial analytics, and catastrophe risk management, Brian shares how Property Guardian delivers actionable data and empowers users to make smarter decisions.
Q: What is Green Shield Risk’s Property Guardian?
A: Property Guardian is a really exciting suite of capabilities – it’s not just one solution. When it comes to catastrophe risk, and especially when it comes to wildfire, we are trying to address the problems that exist from an underwriting standpoint, a portfolio management standpoint, and from a real-time event response perspective.
On the underwriting side, we’re focused on providing best-in-class analytics on wildfire and leveraging the experience of our colleagues, who actually served in the fire service. Property Guardian brings together and evaluates the data – not just the regional or community level hazard risk for wildfire, but more specifically the structure and the parcel. This gives underwriters an edge and allows them to find the hidden gems.
And as part of Green Shield’s focus on prevention and mitigation, our Property Guardian Executive Insight Reports provide bespoke property-specific risk mitigation recommendations. We can do on-site inspections, audit an entire portfolio, and give scoring across those properties that help carriers and underwriting teams understand which ones have the best opportunities for mitigation.
Q: How do companies access Property Guardian Executive Insight Reports?
A: We have a dedicated website underwriters can log into. They provide the location information, along with the account or policy information, and then submit. We then pull in and package all of the data into a singular Core Report that includes specific structure and parcel risk information at a community and a regional level, as well as aerial imagery of the property.
If an underwriter wants to go to the next level, we offer an Executive Insights Report, which is reviewed by the Property Guardian team first before it is sent to the underwriter. We provide a narrative to bring to life some of the data included in the Core Report and provide certified risk mitigation recommendations.
Q: Who Does Property Guardian benefit?
A: The primary customer we’ve focused on is the underwriter, who today might only have access to one data point when making a risk selection or decision through a risk score from one vendor, for example. Because of the company’s underwriting guidelines, the underwriter may be overly conservative and miss out on a premium opportunity if the score is high.
Property Guardian gives them better risk selection and decision-making tools.
There’s also a host of stakeholders when it comes to underwriting, so having that report in place also benefits the retail agent who might be looking to place that business. The property owner also benefits, because of the risk mitigation recommendations for the property, which offers real solutions to get the coverage at the price they want and reduce their underlying risk.
Up the chain, Property Guardian benefits reinsurers who might be backing that carrier. It provides peace of mind and confidence in their program.
Q: How does the Property Guardian team support customers?
A: We take a lot of pride in what we’re putting out in the market, so all of our Property Guardian customers have support from our team if they have questions about how to interpret and use all this great data and information.
We provide a self-service portal that has recommendations and guidance, and we do a lot of educational training to help our clients, not as just part of the onboarding process. Even before we onboard a client, we spend some time and educate them on how this data can be useful in making quality risk selection decisions.
We want to make sure that whoever the stakeholder is gets the most out of Property Guardian.
