🔒The Hartford’s tech push seeks to improve workplace safety, lower catastrophe losses

Two-century-old property-casualty insurer The Hartford is embracing a startup culture.

The insurer this year has been steadily ramping up its new internet-of-things (IoT) Innovation Lab in the top floor of its 22-story headquarters in downtown Hartford, with a staff of mostly new hires.

In April, the little-known outfit began studying how various network-connected wearable and water-sensor technologies could generate real-time data to transform how businesses prevent or mitigate hazardous working conditions.

For example, the hope is that wearables will help customers detect when a worker falls or is standing in a dangerous area, and that sensors can identify a soon-to-be broken water pipe, among other insights. The data produced by IoT technology, still in its infancy in terms of sample size, is being gathered with the intent that it could procure safer work environments for corporate clients and save The Hartford, which spends billions of dollars annually insuring everything from workers-compensation claims to plants and equipment, significant money.

“IoT is broadly relevant for every product we write, every customer segment we write, and every part of our insurance value chain,” said Dan Campany, a 15-year staffer tasked with leading and building The Hartford’s innovation lab. “We are trying lots of different types of devices to see what resonates with the customer, and what works best for our needs in terms of loss prevention.”

The IoT push is transformative for the 209-year-old insurer, but the effort is not entirely unique.

Specialty insurer Hartford Steam Boiler in recent years has been beefing up its innovation lab — dubbed The Mashup@HSB — to help small to midsized companies prevent or reduce physical damage to their operations. Property-casualty insurer Travelers Cos., which also has a major presence downtown, created the Travelers Innovation Center to foster business and technology innovation and experimentation.

Their efforts are being paired with the Hartford InsurTech Hub, which has brought dozens of insurance-technology startups to the city to hone their products and services and create relationships and even business partnerships with the region’s large insurance industry.

Insurers are committing more time and money to IoT innovations as a growing number of networked devices are giving birth to new industry insights on prediction, prevention and support, industry experts say.

The nine-member IoT Innovation Lab at The Hartford is looking to stay ahead of that trend.

“When we started we benefited from flying under the radar,” said Campany, who regularly updates CEO Christopher Swift and President Doug Elliot on progress made at the innovation lab. “From an organizational standpoint, we are just starting to pull the covers off.”

IoT in practice

Although plans for The Hartford’s IoT lab began taking shape last fall, Campany began working on the so-called internal startup full time in January.

He has since added eight current and new employees to the lab, who range in age from 20 to 58.

The members — including a strategy lead, data engineers and project managers, split among three teams — typically spend more than half of their work day in the approximately 600-square-foot innovation lab, located on the 22nd floor. Campany is already exploring alternative spaces in the building to expand the lab in 2020, to accompany the addition of at least six new hires.

“We’re bringing people in who can do any job, who have the humility to roll up their sleeves and sort of do something that wasn’t in the job description they were hired for months ago,” Campany said. “We all took some level of personal risk joining a brand new insurance innovation team. We selected people who would buy into that mission and get excited about what we are doing here.”

The innovation lab has partnered with IoT vendors Modjoul, Pillar Technologies and StrongArm Technologies, among others, to test and learn how their devices could benefit a growing number of industrial workers.

The lab has installed more than 1,000 IoT devices from eight different brands for customers to date. That includes flood sensors created by Alert Labs Inc. and water-leak detectors from Roost Home Telematics.

The Hartford is also one of several insurers leveraging StrongArm’s FUSE Risk Management Platform, which uses a wearable device to monitor industrial workers’ body movements and detect potential safety risks.

An example on StrongArm’s website shows a worker picking up a heavy object and wearing a sensor, which provides a real-time warning to “improve forward bend,” in order to help prevent a back or other lifting injury. That kind of information can help reduce workers-compensation claims, which can be costly to employers and insurers.

StrongArm says The Hartford’s IoT lab, and its other insurance partners, is critical to developing their products and amassing data to provide new insights for risk selection, underwriting and mitigation.

Campany’s unit is looking to build on that type of data analysis in pushing the insurance industry from being reactive to taking a more proactive approach with customers.

“Instead of just reacting when bad things happen, we want to use this data to help [customers] detect and prevent bad things while they are happening, or even before they happen,” he said. “That’s a big part of why we’re doing what we’re doing.”