Europe-wide, water damage accounts for around 40% of all payouts on domestic insurance policies. This has huge implications for the industry, as it does for homeowners. Because no homeowner or tenant wants to be confronted with the stress and complexity of cleaning up after water damage has occurred.

Insurers are looking to add new services or change their business models to ensure growth going forward. Many see prevention services as a way to add value to their clients and reduce the number of claims and help realizing Data driven Claims Management.

SURU offers Prevention as a Service (PaaS), helping insurers to add value to their clients, resulting in a better combined ratio and higher level of customer retention in a competitive marketplace. To demonstrate the opportunities, SURU has been working together on a three-year pilot project with Finnish insurance group, LähiTapiola, to introduce PaaS which they have presented at DIA Amsterdam 2022.

In his presentation Claus Kurt Nielsen, Director Sales SURU, shared how PaaS works and how the two companies collaborated on the development, scoping, trialing, roll-out, assessment and results of a new concept in domestic insurance: preventive protection. The joint proposition includes covering policy holders against the cost of damage, preventing damage from occurring in the first place.

With the pilot project, the companies take preventive protection from concept to reality, and jointly developed an operational model and pricing structure that proved economically advantageous to both companies. The impact was beyond the initial expectations that were set. In the final analysis, based on over 6,500 data years of information, the companies achieved a sustainable reduction of LähiTapiola’s water damage payouts of more than 80%, taking damage incidence at the high-risk end of their portfolio from 6% to 1% in the process.

How does it work?

Prevention as a Service (PaaS) with SURU means providing clients with a protection service for homeowners by means of a small device that is fitted to the water inlet pipe in domestic homes. Developed by GROHE and marketed as GROHE Sense Guard, this smart water meter remotely monitors water use and automatically shuts off the supply if it detects an abnormal pattern. It then sends an alert to SURU, enabling them to take appropriate action.

When GROHE originally started their ‘product in box’ offer back in 2018, the understanding was that the insurers would implement it themselves. Experience from the partnership with LähiTapiola showed that there was a necessity of delivering an end-to-end service solution.

This required a completely integrated business model and development, including pressure test, of all steps in the ecosystem. To make this happen, the water damage protection business was carved out into a new legal entity with service as a core. This also led to new KPI’s, which relate to, amongst others, houseowner satisfaction, NPS, and the percentual reduction of payouts.

The service solution is divided into a six steps program, starting with the analysis of an insurer’s portfolio and selecting the highest-risk homes, to acquisition, installation to monitoring and claims prevention execution – fully documented by enriched data.

Who is SURU?

SURU, founded in January 2021, is a business unit of LIXIL dedicated to prevent water waste. Starting with water damage prevention by reduction or elimination. SURU has technology and services developed and build on the GROHE Sense water security system, which was launched under the GROHE brand in 2017 and consists of the control unit GROHE Sense Guard, the water sensor GROHE Sense and the GROHE Sense App. SURU protects homeowners with an end-to-end insurance industry solution. Ready for integration.

Visit their website here: https://www.suru-water.com

Watch their Deep Dive presentation at DIA Amsterdam 2022.