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[00:00:04] Danny Wood: Hello and welcome to Insurance Business TV. I'm Danny Wood, News Editor of Insurance Business Australia. Our five-star insurance innovators report looks at the most innovative stakeholders in the insurance industry in Australia and New Zealand. One of them, according to our metrics, is Sydney-headquartered Nearmap, a specialist in high-resolution aerial imagery, location intelligence services and geospatial mapping. David Tobias is Chief Product Officer. Hi, David, and congratulations. 

[00:00:34] David Tobias: Thanks, Danny. We're excited to be here and be recognized in this way. 

[00:00:38] Danny Wood: Yeah, and it's really nice to talk to you. And one reason for your high ranking is an offering you have called Portfolio Intelligence. Can you just walk us through how this offering brings together AI-powered detections and aerial imagery? 

[00:00:52] David Tobias: Yeah. No, we're exciting to bring this product to market. I think for those who maybe don't know Nearmap, we make camera systems, very high resolution camera systems. We put them on planes and we fly at high resolution and high frequency across Australia and New Zealand. On top of that, we use AI to produce different elements around the property. the buildings on those properties. So things like, where is the building? What is the size of the building, the shape and the material of the roofs? Is there pools, solar panels, etc. And those things roll up into different scores, risk factors. Portfolio intelligence takes those very granular data points and makes them accessible to the business. So the business can make decisions as to, is this area trending better or worse from a quality perspective? Is this area in a bushfire zone or flood zone? And what type of tweaks do we need to make? And also looking at those changes in aggregate helps you decide, is it getting better or worse over time? Are certain pockets giving you better or worse business that you need to monitor? And so really taking those down to the inch, down to the centimeter data points and rolling them all the way up to the aggregate level. so the business folks can make decisions on them. That's really the core of what portfolio intelligence does. 

[00:02:22] Danny Wood: I understand that customer feedback played a pretty big role in how you designed the features of this offering. Can you just talk about how that played a part? 

[00:02:31] David Tobias: Sure. My biggest fear always is making things nobody cares about and taking them to the market. So when your customers come to you and ask, and then you hear it more than once, and you hear it from different people. It's such a helpful metric on deciding what to build. And that's really what happened in the situation around portfolio intelligence. Our customer said, you've created some really great tools for an individual underwriter, underwriting assistant, producer to go look at a property, but you haven't taken those up a level where as a management team, we can really look in aggregate at whole areas, whole regions, and make these decisions, these trade-off decisions that insurance Management has to make every day on where they're going to focus their time, their resources, their spending. And so this came directly from customers saying, the data you have on a property level is fantastic. Help me roll it up to a higher level order where we can make day-to-day business decisions as a management team. 

[00:03:33] Danny Wood: And how important is Neomap's in-house control of imagery capture processing? and AI model development to the reliability of this offering? 

[00:03:43] David Tobias: You know, I equate it in a lot of ways to, you know, what we see in hardware, where you take, you know, Apple as an example, making the iPhone and the iOS and the apps, the App Store and the, you know, the different subscriptions that they sell that, you know, interconnect these things in iCloud and so on. It's very, very important, right? Building all these tools and creating a seamless pipeline of the imagery to the AI to the intelligence and the portfolio level or the property level. If you don't own that stack, it's really hard to do that. It's hard to guarantee quality. It's hard to guarantee consistency. And it really is a tremendous benefit to the customer. They don't have to think about where to source all these things and go to vendor A, vendor B, vendor C, right? You can come in and say, look, we're going to provide you insights. that you can take action on right out of the box. 

[00:04:38] Danny Wood: And for the insurers and underwriters using this at both the underwriting and the portfolio management level, I mean, how does portfolio intelligence change their day-to-day decision making process? 

[00:04:51] David Tobias: Yeah, it's, you know, that aggregated insight, traditionally, maybe a few people in the company had, but it's expensive and hard to get that. You might have had your business intelligence, business analysts working on reports for a month or two to create some of these insights if you even had access to the data in the first place. So what we've seen is that ability to have this data and essentially have it updated every day, multiple times a day, right? Whenever new imagery comes in, whenever new AI comes in, it's allowing underwriters and... management, underwriting managers and claims managers to really monitor their book. A property isn't stagnant, right? Conditions change, whether it be from weather, from human change, right? I put a new roof on, I added solar panels, I put a pool or a trampoline and property and condition aren't stagnant. So your book of business in aggregate isn't stagnant either. It's changing every, every day. So these tools from So Nearmap and portfolio intelligence are allowing that management to see these things, react to them and get ahead of them and make these more strategic decisions that have to happen in an aggregate level, right? It's fine to look at one property and decide what you want to do with that one property, but insurers manage portfolios of risk, right? They don't manage just one property on one street, right? They're managing large portfolios. So this is giving visibility in an aggregate way that really just didn't exist before. And having it interconnected with that up-to-date imagery, up-to-date AI is really, really unique. 

[00:06:32] Danny Wood: David, thanks very much for talking with us. 

[00:06:35] David Tobias: Thanks so much for having us. We're very excited to participate this and be recognized and really appreciate it. 

[00:06:43] Danny Wood: And David Tobias is Chief Product Officer for NearMap, who won a top ranking in our IB 5-Star Insurance Innovators Award. Thanks for watching Insurance Business TV. Bye for now.