Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Industry update

Sky-Futures brings Flock on board as drone insurance partner to support its global expansion

Sky-Futures, one of the world’s leading drone inspection and survey service providers, has appointed connected insurance provider, Flock, as its drone insurance partner.

The partnership will enable Sky-Futures to seamlessly scale its drone insurance in line with its global expansion plans. The company has now conducted hundreds of large scale projects in over 33 countries, with further plans for expansion for 2021.

Sky-Futures will also be able to harness insights generated by Flock’s risk intelligence engine to further optimise safety standards, allowing them to continue reducing risk and thereby unlock additional insurance savings.

In the past 10 years, Sky-Futures has risen to prominence as one of the largest drone-based inspection and survey organisations globally. The company conducts a range of services across sectors including oil and gas, telecommunications, utilities, renewables, engineering, maritime and survey. Sky-Futures was acquired by private equity-backed, asset integrity management business, ICR Integrity in May 2019.

Chris Blackford, CEO of Sky-Futures said: “Safety is key for Sky-Futures and our customers, and we needed an insurance partner that shared this focus in everything they do. Flock goes above and beyond, helping to drive safety standards across the drone industry and accelerating the adoption of emerging technology worldwide.

“As we’ve continued to expand globally, we needed to ensure that our insurance partner had the capability to keep up with our complex needs and rapid rate of growth. We are adding new drones, pilots, and locations to our policy almost every week, it was therefore important that we engaged a data-driven insurtech like Flock could keep up with our quickly changing requirements.”

Ed Leon Klinger, CEO of Flock said: “At Flock, we take pride in supporting some of the world’s largest drone fleets with fair, flexible and transparent insurance. Sky-Futures has been an industry pioneer for many years, and we’re delighted to bring them on board.

“In an increasingly connected and autonomous world, it’s essential that insurance companies leverage the vast amounts of real-time data available to provide fair, accurate pricing for their customers. But we can go further – at Flock, we’re helping our customers understand their own exposure to complex risks, how this impacts their policy price, and how to reduce it over time”.

Established in 2016, Flock has analysed over a million drone flights and insures thousands of commercial drone operators, from micro-SMEs to global fleets. The insurtech’s risk intelligence engine ingests realtime, third party and proprietary data to calculate risk on a per-flight basis. This analysis takes into account a wide variety of datasets, from hyper-local weather and traffic flows to the operating temperature and wind resistance of the drones themselves.

Flock uses the data generated by its risk intelligence engine to create in-depth risk profiles of every operator it insures. These risk profiles allow Flock to provide customers with exposure-based insurance policies and reports detailing the major factors impacting risk. By making operational changes based on these risk reports, companies can improve safety standards and, as a result, unlock additional insurance savings.

The London-based insurtech is now working with insurers to scale globally and apply its technology to additional industries, all as part of its goal of becoming the go-to insurer for a connected and autonomous world.

(source: press release)

Wiebe de Jager

Wiebe de Jager is the founder of Dronewatch (available in Dutch and English). Wiebe is an experienced drone pilot (EASA Specific category certified) and has published a number of bestselling books about drone photography and cinematography.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *