Startup Profile: Addresscloud

Addresscloud is a cloud-based API software geocoding service that enables insurers to vastly enhance their underwriting and pricing performance on both existing and new policies, delivering an improved customer experience through the provision of property-specific data.

Addresscloud was founded by Mark Varley, CEO, in July 2015. Mark previously worked in the insurance market for 15 years and recognised a huge gap in insurers’ knowledge when it comes to the addresses of their policyholders, and the peril information they hold on individual properties. These gaps – often vast – are a result of a mixture of legacy issues, the delegation of underwriting to third parties, manual input errors, address format changes and overall poor address management.

The vision was to develop a fast, accurate and scalable address management service for the UK and Ireland that was easy to use and to integrate into insurers existing systems. Starting out with RSA as its first client, Addresscloud built a first in class, data-driven cloud-based platform delivering over 10 million address searches for a wide range of UK and international businesses from Blue chip global insurers to insurtech start-ups.

Since 2015, Addresscloud’s platform has enabled insurers to assess risk at rooftop, rather than postcode level, which vastly improves underwriting and pricing accuracy. The service can also correct, and cleanse existing property data held by insurers which is often inaccurate or even completely missing. The AddressFirst database, for example, makes over 29 million addresses available instantaneously with monthly, and from next year, daily updates.

In addition to location accuracy, an Intelligence Service (Intel API) has now been added. This collates data on a wide range of perils such as flood, subsidence, and crime, all sourced from commercial providers and government sources. To enhance this further, the Intelligence API also encompasses information on the property itself, such as its type, age, footprint area and rebuild cost.

The insurance market is hard to break into, particularly due to its risk averse, and conservative nature, so getting the product right was the key focus. And it has already paid off. Five years on, its customer base has grown way beyond the team’s original expectations and now includes a mixture of start-up businesses through to FTSE 100 insurers, and retailers.

Customers use the service in a number of ways. Insurer RSA uses its API to provide address lookup and validation services for customers. Aggregator Comparethemarket uses its API for prefilling property characteristics such as type of house, age, and number of rooms. And Flood Re has signed a deal to use its platform and service to help it determine whether a property can be ceded to the government’s reinsurance programme.

Addresscloud’s focus next year is to build on its vision, expand its location intelligence offering and develop a new service to deliver an early warning exposure system to better manage their risk. The original team of three has now expanded to seven and more staff are being recruited for 2022 to drive forward development over the next 18 months.