The fastest flood claims ever paid?

FloodFlash is based upon three key ideas. We make commercial flood insurance fast, easy and flexible. We’ve already proved two of the three ideas. Our quotes are flexible – allowing brokers and their clients to choose trigger depths, payouts and premiums that suit them. The process is easy, with no long documents and simpler policies. When Storm Ciara hit FloodFlash clients at the beginning of February, we got a chance to prove just how fast we could be. Spoiler alert – it’s fast!

The real pace of parametric payouts

When floods hit on a Sunday afternoon FloodFlash paid claims by Monday evening, a single day later. That’s not a day after the clients submitted their claims. It’s a day after the floods. In fact, the clients didn’t even submit a claim. They were underway as soon as our sensors registered the flooding.

Flood insurance and speed don’t typically go together. Many of our clients cite previous claims that took weeks or even months to resolve. You can imagine what our clients thought about a next-day payout…

The need for speed: why rapid-payouts are the future of flood insurance

We put “rapid-payouts” on our leaflets – but it isn’t a claim we make out of vanity. There are many reasons why a fast settlement is beneficial for businesses recovering from a flood.

1. Limiting business interruption: when a business experiences a flood, a day feels like a long time. Being closed means losing business in the short term – but it can also mean losing customers after they turn to competitors to fulfil orders they need in the interim. When payouts take weeks or even months, the loss of reputation can be far more damaging than short term BI. Worse still, traditional policies rarely compensate BI in full when there are many hidden costs.
2. Averting long term property damage: flood waters bring many horrible side effects. Damp and mould are amongst those that stick around the longest. Damp and mould do more damage if they are left to set in. A long wait for money opens a business up to longer term disruption. Letting property damage spread also inflates the value of the final claim – making traditional insurance at renewal even more unlikely.
3. Cash-flow is protected: the lifeblood of any business is cash-flow. When flooding hits, fast payouts ensure that wages, taxes or rent are still paid. Receiving a full payout a year after a flood is useless if a business has laid off all its skilled employees or been shuttered by tax-payments in the months in-between.
4. Psychological impacts are smaller: it’s estimated that the average time to recover from a flood psychologically is around two years. We estimate that a large amount of the stress that comes from floods arises from slow claims procedures. Resolving claims quickly reduces the insecurity around finances to a much shorter time. This can only be beneficial to the mental health of flood victims.

Rapid-payout in action: an example claim

On a Sunday afternoon in February an automotive garage near Halifax was under half a metre of water. By the close of business the following day they had received their insurance payout in full. Here’s how it happened…

Apply for rapid-payout cover for your business

FloodFlash is available for commercial clients across the UK, no matter their business or claims history. For more information visit our homepage or get in touch.