Drones and traditional insurance procedures continue to create major issues for operators both in terms of wasted time and expense. In order to create a more straightforward insurance application process for larger organizations, Flock recently launched Flock Enterprise, the world’s first real-time insurance and risk-management product for drone fleets.

Founded in 2015, Flock is using Big Data to quantify, intelligently price, and mitigate drone flight risks in real-time, providing drone pilots with fairer insurance pricing tailored to individual risk profiles. One year ago, when we spoke with Flock’s CEO, Ed Leon Klinger, the company, in partnership with Allianz, had just launched Flock Cover, Europe’s first Pay-as-you-fly drone insurance mobile app geared towards drone SMEs. Earlier this year, Flock rolled out a flexible monthly subscription product, and now Flock Enterprise.

“We’ve found that our Pay-as-you-fly policies (which provide short-term cover by the hour) are really popular with pilots who have just completed their commercial drone training,” Klinger said. “During these early stages, pilots may not be flying enough to justify the expense of an annual policy and would prefer to invest resources into getting their business off the ground - which our Pay-as-you-fly product allows them to do. As their business grows, they can easily switch to our monthly policy which provides cover for an unlimited number of commercial flights in a month, alongside out-of-flight equipment protection.”

Like Flock Cover, Flock Enterprise uses Flock’s proprietary Risk Intelligence Engine to analyze and price real-time drone flight risks on an individual basis. This allows larger organizations to acquire real-time insurance for drone fleets. However, contrary to the company’s Pay-as-you-fly policies, which are sold via an app, “Flock Enterprise syncs with third-party drone data collection platforms, ingesting the flight data it needs to assess (and price) flights”, Dara Cormican, Flock’s Marketing and Communications Executive, clarified. “These individual flight prices are aggregated and paid in arrears at the end of each month.”

“Coverage limits are higher than our other two products, with in-flight equipment limits reaching £1.5M and Public Liability cover up to £25M,” Klinger told Commercial UAV News. “In addition, Flock Enterprise provides granular per-flight risk insights which enterprises can use to improve safety standards across their fleets and reduce their insurance premiums as a result. “

Texo DSI Limited, who owns a dynamic fleet of drones for fully integrated survey and inspection services across a range of sectors, is already using Flock Enterprise to provide them with a fairly priced insurance that takes their unique risk profile and approach to safety excellence into account.

“We see Flock more as a partner than as an insurer,” said David Williams, Chief Operating Officer, Texo iHUB. “Rather than simply offering us a price, they actively help our pilots and risk managers identify and minimize the organizational risks we’re undertaking.”

During the past year, Flock has analyzed and priced the risk for more than 500,000 Pay-as-you-fly drone flights and gained a deeper understanding of the most common drone flight risks. With this data, Flock can develop tools that help to mitigate those risks, such as one the company’s working right now: a graph that allow pilots to visualize “how specific risks (such as the weather) change over the course of a day, allowing them to easily identify the safest time to fly”.

“We’ve also scaled our risk analysis technology to build out our product suite, which has helped us to acquire 30% of UK commercial drone businesses as customers,” Klinger continued. “This range of products enables us to cater to the needs of the entire drone industry, from SMEs all the way up to the largest enterprises using drones.”

According to a recent white paper, the company believes “it is time for the insurance industry to embrace such technologies, leverage Big Data, and rise to the challenge of pricing, insuring, and mitigating the risks of our rapidly evolving, autonomous world.”

Flock Enterprise is available for UK-based drone organizations only, but the company plans to make it internationally available in the future.