Apr 29, 2015 -- Decision making around flood risk has never been more crucial for the profitability of the insurance industry with an estimated 5 million UK homes vulnerable to flooding, record breaking rainfall becoming more common, and Flood Re due to be rolled out later this year.

In response to these challenges, flood risk specialist Ambiental has recently launched FloodScore™ their online flood risk checking service. It has been developed for insurers, Lloyd’s syndicates, cover holders and risk managers to provide instant access to flood risk scores for properties in England, Scotland and Wales and will enable them to quickly evaluate and quantify flood risk. This will allow for more consistent flood underwriting, better accumulation control and improved loss ratios.

“Ambiental’s FloodScore™ service uses Ambiental’s high precision UKFloodMap4™ and OS AddressBase products to give the most comprehensive and accurate flood analysis in the marketplace. With the best building level address information clients can be confident what exposure they are open to when using FloodScore™”. Nick Macready, Strategic Partner Manager at Ordnance Survey.

FloodScore™ lets subscribers search for individual addresses and view the likelihood and severity of that specific property being flooded due to rainfall, overflowing rivers or tidal surges. According to Dr Justin Butler, Managing Director of Ambiental: “We developed FloodScore™ following numerous requests from insurance companies, brokers and risk managers for a cost-effective cloud-based system that lets users instantly access flood risk information on a transactional basis.”

FloodScore™ results page providing a flexible analysis from a single overall

score down to detailed depth data for each property

Ambiental designed FloodScore™ to make comprehensive assessment of property-level flood risk quick and simple. The results include a range of return periods and the likely depth of the floodwaters for each of the flood severities under consideration. Each property also has a single overall score and reports are automatically saved, so as to provide a search history in support of users’ due diligence, auditing and customer management functions.  

Dr Butler believes the service will make a big difference to both the operations and profit margins of companies needing the most accurate possible flood risk data: “The FloodScore™ service gives users instant, flexible, on-demand access to building-level flood risk scores without having to manage and run heavy databases on their own systems, or worry about updating their data sources. It enables users to make decisions more quickly and with greater confidence, by providing the information they need to manage accumulations better, reduce loss ratios and select those risks most likely to provide a good return.”

By responding directly to industry demand and using the most current data, Ambiental believes that FloodScore™ will significantly raise the standards of flood risk analysis in the UK and make the insight provided by technically sophisticated flood modelling far more widely accessible.