Emerging vehicle technologies, changes to the liability landscape and the ever-increasing volume of information sources are creating a challenge for insurers. Especially when considering the information gathered at the outset of a claim is crucial to the validation of policy cover and determination of legal liability.
In April 2021, the UK government was the first in the world to green-light the use of self-driving vehicles at slow speeds on motorways. The difficulty of establishing legal liability when vehicles have automation modes engaged has long been recognised – in a recent public comment, Mercedes accepted that they, as the car manufacturer, may be liable for an accident in some circumstances.
Separately, from January 2022, amendments to the UK Highway Code introduced different expectations of drivers to protect vulnerable categories of road users. And the government has pledged to follow this with further amendments to recognise the advent of vehicle automation.
These, and similar developments ahead, will result in many more diverse data sources in multiple formats, and all will require consideration in the assessment of liability.
In days gone by, statements from the parties and witnesses, together with photographs of an accident location, were often the only inputs to a liability decision that could have significant cost implications. Nowadays, on-board vehicle data, dashcam video streams, images, social media content and so much more can go into the mix to determine what actually occurred, why and how.
Only those insurers with the capability to ingest, process and analyse that huge diversity of unstructured data will have the most complete picture in front of them. The prospect of faster, better informed and evidentially sustainable liability decisions will increasingly depend on data management capability.
At 360Globalnet, our unstructured data and analytics technology provides the answer to this challenge. Most businesses can only interrogate data in structured formats. However, our technology, 360Retrieve, turns all of the available data (including emails, images, PDFs, video metadata and free text fields from case management systems) into searchable information capable of sophisticated analysis. It can also bring together any internal, external, industry or third-party data to ensure you can make the most informed decisions. The powerful analytics engine can enable trend identification, large loss predictors, fraud detection and so much more.
If you would like your business to have access to ALL the available data when making important and potentially costly legal liability decisions, get in touch to arrange a no-obligation demonstration of how 360Retrieve can widen your data horizons.
