Satellite Techechnologies For Agri-Finance Sector
On May 25, 2023, EOS Data Analytics, a global provider of AI-powered satellite imagery analytics, together with FONCOSPA, a Mexican insurance fund aimed at agriculture businesses, held a free webinar dedicated to the ways remote sensing solutions can be of use to the insurance industry and financial institutions.
The webinar focused on the challenges insurance firms face in agricultural development and the benefits the existing solutions already bring them.
To access the presentation (in Spanish), follow the link.
The representatives of agribusinesses, financial institutions, insurance companies, and journalists attended the online event.
The following speakers made presentations on the webinar:
- Dmytro Svyrydenko, Account Executive at EOSDA
- Joel Cruz Basilio, Fund Manager at FONCOSPA
On the webinar, Dmytro Svyrydenko focused his speech on how EOSDA’s satellite and remote sensing technologies can be of use for banking and insurance in general. Joel Cruz Basilio shared how the FONCOSPA insurance fund already leverages those technologies in their everyday flow to improve their agricultural credit system.
Recent advancements in satellite technology and artificial intelligence have led to the appearance of robust tools for financial institutions to monitor crop health, predict yields, and manage risks in real-time.
In agricultural insurance, EOSDA Crop Monitoring is used to track the state of the fields and use the collected data to protect farmers against unforeseen risks and financial losses. The platform integrates multiple types of data in one place, making customer risk profiling a much smoother process and reducing damage assessment costs compared to the traditional field approach.
The historical data archive in EOSDA Crop Monitoring enables tracking shifts in plant productivity and weather patterns. This allows insurers to review their policies in light of evolving risks associated with climate change. And providing customers with access to the platform can help build their trust, address their skepticism or knowledge gaps about the satellite technology, and ensure equal information distribution among all parties involved in the insurance contract in the event of insured incidents.
One EOSDA Crop Monitoring feature that stands out among others is index calculation. It allows insurers to detect and verify the existence of insured events remotely. Benefits? Faster application validation, better accuracy, and reduced risks of potential litigation. Simpler and more scalable risk assessment can also be a prerequisite for international agricultural insurance.
However, insurance businesses can benefit not only from EOSDA Crop Monitoring but also from its custom solutions:
- yield prediction allows better assessment of agricultural production risks
- harvest dynamics monitoring over several seasons enable better decisions on harvest dates
- advanced soil moisture analytics makes it possible to stay on top of drought trends and generate viable insurance policies with accurate warnings
- field boundaries detection rules our errors in claim validation
- crop type classification helps set specific insurance premiums for each plant variety and find new customers growing particular plant species.
EOS Data Analytics also offers its own EOSDA Crop Monitoring API to integrate satellite images and analytics into the insurers’ existing software.
To illustrate the possibilities of EOSDA solutions, Joel Cruz Basilio took the word and revealed how remote sensing helped FONCOSPA improve the agricultural credit system. Their fund leveraged EOSDA’s satellite data analytics to assess and monitor crop health throughout the growing season across the vast expanses of farmland they insured.
Insurance experts were able to leverage advanced predictive analytics of crop yields and timely monitor the field conditions, which allowed them to assess risks more precisely. FONCOSPA expanded their insurance services to protect every crop type, as well as the expected harvest amounts. Insurance capabilities became flexible, with the possibility of adjustment to field productivity.
On top of that, farmers can leverage insurance for natural disasters, such as excess soil moisture, low temperatures, flood, frost, drought, hail, pests, predators, crop diseases, heat waves, impossibility of sowing, hurricanes, landslides, subsidence, avalanches, and more. As Joel Cruz Basilio, Fund Manager at FONCOSPA, shared during the webinar, EOSDA Crop Monitoring also enabled the prompt settlement of claims, as satellite data provided objective, timely evidence of those detrimental weather events or pest infestations that negatively impact yields.
By integrating satellite imagery analytics into their insurance system, FONCOSPA improved their risk assessment and management capabilities and enhanced trust with their farmer clients, who saw a more transparent, fair, and responsive insurance process.
In the final part of the webinar, Dmytro Svyrydenko shared a couple of success stories of EOSDA’s clients. For the World Bank, EOS Data Analytics analyzed the vegetation cover of the Ukrainian lands in 2016-2021 and classified all crops with 90%+ accuracy. This data allowed the World Bank to increase the transparency and efficiency of land asset management in Ukraine and contribute to the development of the agricultural insurance market in the country.
With EOSDA Crop Monitoring and historical data available in it, the Mexican reinsurance carrier Der Neue Horizont Re, S.A. started validating insurance claims faster and allocating exploration resources more efficiently.
While the benefits of satellite technologies already attract many insurance businesses, EOS Data Analytics plans to ramp up its solutions even more: with its agriculture-focused EOS SAT satellite constellation planned to go into full operation in 2025, the company will be able to provide even higher temporal, spatial, and spectral resolution satellite data for more precise analysis and prediction.