Flock App Offers On-demand Drone Insurance

A London-based insurance-tech start-up can offer drone users the chance to “pay as you fly” with a new UAV insurance app.

The aptly-named Flock announced last week the launch of Flock Cover, a smart-device app that can provide insurance on-demand to commercial UAS pilots operating in the UK.

Policy pricing start as low as $6.90 for up to eight hours of hull and liability coverage. Comparing the service to ride-sharing, geo-location services like Uber, Flock officials say the process takes just a few minutes to create a profile and purchase insurance.

“This means pilots can easily identify the cost of insurance for each job, expensing these costs to their clients if they so wish,” a Flock press release states. “Flock pilots have the power to customize their liability limits on a per-flight basis, with the app giving a range of options … and this can be done in a matter of taps on a smartphone, at any time of the day.”

The company recently partnered with global aviation insurer Allianz, which underwrite Flock’s insurance policies in the UK. A company official explains the process:

“What cements Flock’s departure from traditional insurers is its heavily data-driven approach to insurance. Pilots choose a 500-meter radius circle; Flock’s proprietary algorithms then aggregate and analyze localized data within that area to quantify the risk of any given drone flight in real-time. This dynamic risk assessment generates a proportionally priced quote, which is immediately visible to the user. The result is a fully transparent and extremely competitively priced alternative to the UK market’s current offering of ‘flat-rate’ annual policies.”

Drone insurance is perhaps one of the fastest-growing new types of coverage in the industry. In November, the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) announced a partnership with Harry A. Koch Insurers to market UAV insurance to the commercial drone community and pilots as a membership benefits at a reduced rate. Earlier in 2017, Acend teamed up with Liberty Specialty Markets, a subsidiary of Liberty Mutual Insurance Group, to launch DroneInsurance.com, a platform that “makes buying drone insurance easy to understand and convenient to purchase online.”