"I earned my gray hair," Mark Gardella told Digital Insurance. "I've been around for a little while."
Gardella spent nearly 18 years on the carrier side of insurance. Early in his career he worked in an R&D unit with the express purpose of figuring out what to do with the Internet. Now, he is the CEO and co-founder of Sertis, a managing general agency in the multi-family insurance market that uses a proprietary risk assessment technology integrated into a property management platform.
Sertis operates across the U.S. and has closed two
"What we've done is we've developed a FICO-like score, called the Sertis Risk Indicator, and it acts as a FICO score down to the property level," Gardella said. "We've established what we call templates, but think of them as inspections, preventative maintenance, safety things, all the things that you would want, if you owned apartment buildings all over the place. [What] you'd want your maintenance people to be doing on a consistent basis to make a safe and resilient property. We've created those templates, and anybody who comes into the program has to commit to deploying the Leo software and using these templates."
Those templates include for example suggesting a maintenance person walk a property once a week to monitor the lights are working in the parking lot and there aren't any tripping hazards.
"Anybody who's committing to this, will become proactive in better management of the property. So we're willing to make that bet and give them better terms and conditions based on that," Gardella said. "It's no different than telematics, 'Hey, if you're a better driver, you're not doing donuts in the middle of the road, maybe you should get a better price, right?' It's the same thesis."
The company also has access to incident reports to monitor what is happening on the ground. If someone for example said they broke their arm slipping on snow at, noon, Sertis can then go back to the snow log and see when it was removed to determine the legitimacy of the claim.
"What telematics has shown us over the last 30 years is if you get down on the ground, and you see how behaviors happen, you're in a better position to more accurately price risk," Gardella said. "And that's what we're looking to do. We're looking to reward proactive, good operators."
Moving forward the company is planning to refine its models to become more predictive and to share the risk score with brokers, insurers and insureds so they can better understand the risk. Additionally, Gardella shared that the company will continue to leverage additional data sources to gain more insights for underwriting.
