I had a fun meeting today in Tokyo with the CEO of Chartis Japan.  This story was covered by the Japanese media, so not confidential, and I thought it worth rehashing in english, for the multiple levels of learning it provides.

On March 11 of this year, a huge earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan, as we all know.  The impact on many aspects of the economy – including the insurance business – is well charted territory.  What I never heard before was this story.  The CEO sat down with his team in the three days hence and they told him that they didn’t know how they were going to handle all the claims in a timely basis.  Some level-headed questioning pointed out the reason – there were simply not enough qualified engineers and architects on staff to make all the visits required along with the claims adjusters.  The innovative CEO (former CIO, by the way) suggested that they get creative.  What if the few architects and engineers they had could make the visits without making actual visits?  He ordered 200 ipad 2 machines – not yet released in Japan at the time – and gave them to the claims adjusters.  He put google maps on them so that they could navigate how to get to their valued policyholders (not a trivial task, as you can imagine, with roads out and flooding everywhere).  Once they were there, they used mobile technology to go online video with a small team of architects and engineers huddled in a room back at headquarters.  They were able to show the damaged property in each case, moving the ipad around to accommodate questions (“i need to see the damage to the roof – hold up the ipad”) and make on the spot decisions about eligibility and claims amounts.  Once the policyholder agreed and clicked ‘accept’ the money was transferred into his/her account the next day.  In this way, they were able to make 8 times as many claims assessments as they might have otherwise, providing comprehensive top notch service.  Not only that, they had a solid audit trail of where the adjusters were, thanks to google maps pinpointing their locations.

A funny thing happened in the months after the tsunami.  business went up by 240% as existing Chartis customers thought the service was so good, and so cool (ipads!) that they decided to take out additional coverage, such as auto insurance.

Pretty cool story, eh?  nice job, Chartis Japan.  (sometimes CIOs make really good CEOs!).