Journal
Household files after a named storm: separating surge from leakage
A named storm is a volume event. Comparing it with a quiet quarter and calling the difference leakage is how a board scares itself. The work is to split the storm cohort from the rest of the household book and then split the storm again: by first notification date, by trade on the largest invoice, and by whether the property had a previous escape-of-water or roof claim.
In several British books we have read, the coastal postcodes the committee feared were not where the extras sat. The extras sat with a small number of contractors and in the second week after landfall, when make-safe had become a fuller job. That is a procurement and authorisation question, not a catastrophe-load question.
First notification date is doing a lot of work here. If handlers book late calls to the storm code because the policyholder mentioned the wind, your storm cohort will include ordinary trees that would have come in anyway. Sample those files. A chart cannot tell a willow from a named event.
Repair inflation during a surge is real. So is a contractor putting through a second visit that would have been refused in July. The briefing should hold both sentences. Flattening them into a single ‘severity up’ arrow helps no one at the pricing meeting.
We like a simple table: days from landfall in rows, trade in columns, paid amount in the cells, for the storm cohort only. It is not pretty. A claims director can read it on a train to Edinburgh.
If you will ask us for a storm read, keep the Met Office event name off the claim until someone has confirmed the peril. A default storm tag is a default story.