Insurance customers expect a smooth, straightforward experience. But outdated, manual processes can slow things down — frustrating customers and leaving insurers with incomplete or inaccurate information.
Traditional applications often rely on postcode-level data and customer estimates. That means insurers don’t always get the detail they need to assess risk properly, and customers are asked to fill in forms they’re not equipped to complete.
Insurers that adopt automated data entry and document processing have seen significant improvements, with 80-90% fewer manual data entry errors and 20-25% higher employee productivity as staff focus on complex cases rather than repetitive administrative work. But there’s still a gap between what insurers need and what customers can realistically provide.
The limitations of postcode-level risk assessment
Postcodes can only tell you so much, and postcode-based risk assessment can be a limitation of the insurance pricing process. The assessments don’t reflect the unique characteristics of individual properties — and when customers are asked to describe things like construction details, building materials, or environmental risks, they often don’t have the technical knowledge to do so.
The result is incomplete applications, with residential applications being abandoned, or commercial applications requiring follow-ups, delaying insurance decisions from being made.
Precision through location data
With accurate location data, insurers can enrich their systems with verified property details — reducing reliance on customer input and improving the quality of risk assessments.
The Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) acts as the golden thread, allowing insurers to link property data, like Ordnance Survey's National Geographic Database (NGD) or external data to specific properties.
OS NGD is split into various themes, providing insights from location to building characteristics:
- NGD Address Theme provides definitive address information to ensure every property is correctly positioned within the right risk category.
- NGD Buildings Theme offers detailed property intelligence, including construction materials, age, physical state, solar roof presence, building height, and roof type.
- NGD Land Use Theme gives the environmental context, site status (Under construction, active, derelict etc), identifying surrounding land characteristics that influence risk exposure, like trees or rivers.
Our buildings database covers millions of properties across Great Britain, capturing everything from roof styles to whether there's a basement below. With more than a billion individual data points, the data gives reliable, precise information about any building's features and layout, helping insurers make confident decisions based on real-world detail.
Location data and the future of insurance underwriting
With verified property data built into application forms, customers don’t need to provide as much information manually. This streamlined approach means fewer errors, faster processing, and smoother experience all round. Customers receive quicker responses based on their property's actual characteristics rather than broad, postcode-level assumptions.
Underwriting teams can benefit too, making decisions based on authoritative datasets, resulting in faster, more accurate risk evaluation that supports competitive pricing while maintaining appropriate risk selection. Insurers that can offer rapid, accurate quotes, based on reliable data, will have significant competitive advantages.
With OS data and the support of an OS Partner, insurers can combine speed with precision in ways that traditional approaches cannot match. Reduce the burden of the insurance application process, and enhance customer satisfaction.
Find out more about how OS data can help you make decisions with confidence in insurance by clicking below:
