Insurers are in talks with the Geospatial Intelligence Centre (GIC), a non-profit group owned by the US insurance industry that is expanding its aerial data collection operations to Australia and New Zealand.

GIC uses fixed-wing aircraft with survey-grade cameras to collect high-resolution vertical and oblique images. In the US the data is collected across the country and updated each year for the top 150 metropolitan areas. Images are taken again after catastrophes.

Insurers in the US pay an assessment-based membership fee to access imagery and data, which aims to improve efficiencies in underwriting, claims handling and fraud investigation.

GIC has so far conducted flights over Melbourne and plans to collect aerial imagery covering 90% of the Australian population.

“The Insurance Council of Australia and its members are engaged in ongoing talks with the Geospatial Intelligence Centre,” Insurance Council spokesman Campbell Fuller told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

GIC MD Ryan Bank says the Australian insurance and geospatial market is an attractive opportunity, because the weather and climate is favourable for image collection and there is strong interest in the service.

“We had enough funding to launch in Australia, start the flight program and start collecting that data,” he told insuranceNEWS.com.au while visiting Melbourne last week.

Mr Bank, who is also visiting New Zealand, says the collection approach and technology offers greater capacity and fewer restrictions compared with drones, which are increasingly used in loss adjusting and have complementary uses.

After Hurricane Michael struck the US in October last year – it was the strongest storm in terms of maximum sustained windspeed since Hurricane Andrew in 1992 – 14 aircraft collected high-resolution imagery over two days covering 85,000 square km – an area the size of Ireland and Northern Ireland – with information available for insurers 24 hours later, Mr Bank says.

The technology was also used in assessing damage from the California wildfires, allowing insurers to rapidly see how policyholders were affected and quickly settle claims.

“We can enable insurers to transform the way the customer experiences the insurance relationship,” Mr Bank said.

Information collected by GIC is made available to emergency responders and other priority organisations “at no cost, courtesy of the insurance industry”, he says.

GIC was set up by the US National Insurance Crime Bureau, a 106-year-old body owned by the country’s insurers and self-insurance organisations to fight insurance crimes, mainly in the area of vehicle theft.