Support for Customer Disaster Prevention

Contributing to disaster prevention and mitigation with products and services

Comprehensive Hazard Map Service Using the Latest Digital Technology

Sompo Japan has developed unique hazard maps, the Sumai no Hazard Map, by combining its insurance payment data with the hazard maps issued by public institutions. We started providing these maps at agencies nationwide in April 2018.

1. Aims and concept

• In recent years, Japan has been increasingly prone to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and typhoons, and disaster awareness among customers is increasing. Based on this trend, we have developed a unique comprehensive hazard map service that uses the latest digital technology to visualize natural disaster risks, including the probability of an earthquake, the estimated depth of inundation from flooding, and areas liable to landslides.
• This service is an information tool that staff at our agencies explain to customers when proposing new policies or renewal of fire and earthquake insurance. The service aims to encourage customers to correctly understand the risks of natural disasters in their own communities and to further convince them of the need for the insurance policy.

2. Service outline

(1) Main functions and features

• GIS (Geographic Information System) is a technology that comprehensively organizes, processes, and visually displays location data (spatial data) based on geographical location to facilitate sophisticated analysis and quick judgments.

Rider to Fully Compensate for Buildings and Household Belongings Destroyed or Washed Away in Earthquakes, Eruptions, and Tsunami

From April 2019, Sompo Japan has launched the sale^* at its agencies throughout Japan of an earthquake and other hazards surcharge rider that fully covers buildings and household belongings destroyed or washed away in earthquakes, eruptions, and tsunami.

• We first started selling this rider in October 2015 at a limited number of agencies.

1. Background

• The earthquake insurance provided jointly by the Japanese government and insurance companies compensates only for up to 50% of the fire insurance proceeds.
• When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami occurred, double loans, one for the home that was lost and one for the home that was rebuilt, became a social issue. Rebuilding a home and repurchasing household property requires far more capital than the insurance proceeds from earthquake insurance. After the 2011 disaster, many of our customers expressed a desire for an insurance product to cover the portion not covered by household earthquake insurance.
• We developed this rider in response to such requests.

2.Service outline

• By combining with the proceeds from the earthquake insurance, the rider can compensate for up to 100% of the fire insurance proceeds (replacement costs).
• The rider can be set with our package fire insurance for individuals or package insurance for apartment buildings. We are the first insurer to offer compensation that can cover package insurance for apartment buildings (common areas of condominium buildings).

Insurance Industry’s First Disaster Risk Reduction Service for Local Governments

To prevent losses for citizens due to natural disasters, local governments need to take timely actions, such as issuing evacuation order. Meanwhile, costs may arise (such as costs to open shelters) even if a disaster does not occur at the magnitude that was anticipated, so local governments face challenges in deciding when to issue evacuation order or other guidance if they aim to minimize losses for the community. In this context, Sompo Japan has developed services to support local governments in creating rapid response systems, by providing insurance to compensate them for costs associated with the issuance of evacuation order and other guidance, and by providing weather and response information.
Hundreds of local governments have already purchased the insurance since it was launched.

They will keep developing and expanding this product and service to improve disaster resilience, and collaborate with stakeholders to realize a safer, more secure world.

Supporting Corporate Risk Management in Partnership with Development Bank of Japan (DBJ)

Sompo Japan works with the Development Bank of Japan (DBJ) to support the disaster risk reduction measures of corporate clients.
This comprehensive financial service draws upon both the DBJ’s accurate rating capabilities and non-life insurance and risk management expertise. Sompo Japan offers an insurance service that covers loss of earnings and expenses in the event of operational suspension due to a natural disaster. Companies evaluated by the DBJ as having a high Business Continuity Management (BCM) rating, so called DBJ BCM rating, can receive 20% discount at a maximum on their insurance premium. Sompo Risk Management provides assistance service to DBJ clients who wish to bolster disaster risk countermeasures in their business continuity planning (BCP). We will continue to provide total financial solution services by exploring further opportunities for high-synergy collaboration projects with external partners.

Support for Corporate and Municipal BCP and Disaster Preparedness

＜Corporate offering＞
Following the Great East Japan Earthquake and other natural disasters and COVID-19, corporate initiatives for disaster prevention and mitigation as well as business continuity have shifted to a phase of formulating business continuity plans that anticipate a wide variety of risks, conducting education and training to improve effectiveness in a variety of scenarios, and establishing disaster prevention, mitigation and business continuity systems that support new work style. Sompo Risk Management provides comprehensive support for companies with various concerns through a service lineup that includes formulating an all-hazards approach business continuity plan, planning and implementing a variety of training and drills tailored to specific issues and needs, and providing a disaster headquarters management kit “HONBU-kun”, and an online disaster response training program “STG-DX (Saigai Taio Game)” on top of its existing consulting services.

＜Local government offerings＞
Local governments are required to formulate action plans to protect the lives of residents from various crises, such as back-to-back large-scale natural disasters, the COVID-19 pandemic, and incidents like ballistic missile launches. They must also provide training and run drills in order to enhance emergency response capabilities.
Sompo Risk Management supports the development of disaster- and crisis-resilient communities through formulating plans and manuals (regional disaster prevention plans, operational continuity plans, support plans, regional plans for national land resilience, national protection plans, etc.), planning and conducting education and training, operating councils for people unable to return home, and conducting surveys and research related to disaster countermeasures and other issues.

Free Disaster-related Services to Partners in China

Sompo China, one of our group companies, is the first insurer in China to start providing the following disaster-related services free of charge to its business partners.

Virtual Disaster Drill Service to Enhance Effectiveness of Business Continuity Plans (BCPs)

As globalization advances, companies have expanded their supply chains to foreign markets. In line with this trend, companies are now expected to formulate scenarios in disasters that could strike their facilities outside Japan and to ensure the effectiveness of those scenarios.

Many companies have set up key sites in China due to factors such as the country’s large market. Meanwhile, China presents numerous risks that differ from those in Japan, including abrupt legislative changes, IT infrastructure vulnerabilities, and the possibility of unexpected natural disasters and explosions. Accordingly, there has been a growing need for companies to formulate China-specific scenarios and to enhance the effectiveness of those scenarios.

Against this backdrop, Sompo China has started to provide paper drills, free of charge, to its business partners in order to help them prevent disruption to their critical operations during disasters, and to help them minimize damage and rapidly restore operations in the event of a disruption.

●Service outline

Target: Sompo China business partners (all industries)
Service: Predictive paper drill service

1. Schematic training assuming fire and explosion risks
2. Graphic training assuming the risk of logistics accidents
3. Graphic training assuming environmental legal compliance risks
4. Schematic training assuming the risk of the spread of new infectious diseases
5. Graphic training assuming information security and cyber risk

• Other scenarios will be added according to needs.
  Supported languages: Chinese, Japanese, English

VR Disaster Drill Service

Sompo China has partnered with NK Hatsuta (Shanghai) International Trading, a group company of the major Japanese firefighting equipment company, Hatsuta Seisakusho, to provide a disaster drill service using VR technology to its business partners, free of charge, from April 2019.

●Service outline

Target: Sompo China business partners (all industries)
Service: Virtual disaster drill service
The service uses VR to simulate a fire in a factory, warehouse or skyscraper and offers a virtual reality experience for company employees to evacuate from the disaster area. This virtual reality drill enables participants to experience the tense atmosphere when a fire breaks out and to understand the importance of disaster drills and first response drills for when a disaster occurs that comply with Chinese laws and regulations.
Supported languages: Japanese, Chinese, English

Sompo China will continue to contribute to the security, health, and wellbeing of customers by providing products and services of the highest quality possible.

Digital transformation for wide-area disaster response
(fire and allied insurance)

Following the Fukushima Earthquake on March 16, 2022, Sompo Japan, Palantir Technologies Japan K.K. ("Palantir") and ABEJA Inc. formed a Disaster Response Project in April 2022 to improve business operations in the event of a major natural disaster, and began collecting and integrating data on accidents and insurance benefits and building an app for major natural disasters. This has led to faster payment of insurance claims by substantially streamlining operations through digital transformation in insurance payout operations.

In the past, the information required for damage assessment was dispersed across multiple systems, which required a lot of labor and time for printing and sorting documents, as well as for managing dispatch routes to efficiently visit customer homes.
By collecting and integrating the scattered data onto Palantir's Foundry platform, restructuring it to suit our business processes, and utilizing it in the app we developed, we have been able to streamline our business operations. In a trial conducted at the Miyagi Prefecture Disaster Countermeasures Headquarters, we achieved a significant increase in administrative efficiency of approximately 21%. As a result, customers are able to receive insurance benefits three to four days earlier than before.

After starting development following the Fukushima Earthquake, we developed the system to handle not only earthquakes, but also wind, water, hail, and snow disasters, in order to improve the overall efficiency of wide-area disaster management operations.
We will continue striving for faster insurance benefit payments by using this app.

Collaborative Research on Sophisticating the Evaluation of Long-Period Ground Motion Risks

Sompo Risk Management aims to provide new insurance services and risk consulting services as countermeasures against earthquake risks, one of the major types of natural disaster, and has been researching and developing ways to evaluate such risks in Japan and throughout the world.

As part of the efforts, they conducted collaborative research with the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience and Kobori Research Complex Inc., aiming to improve the accuracy of long-period ground motion^*1 risk evaluations. Long-period ground motion has attracted attention as the cause of damage to high-rise buildings and large-scale structures in plains and basins far from the epicenter, such as ceiling boards collapsing in skyscrapers in Osaka City during the Tohoku-Pacific Ocean Earthquake in 2011. Similar damage to high-rise buildings concentrated in the Kanto, Nobi, and Osaka plains is likely to occur in the event of Nankai Trough or Sagami Trough earthquakes, and in fiscal year 2007 the Japanese government started investigation and research of long-period ground motion.

This research was mainly focused on sophisticating monetary risk evaluations of relevant damage to high-rise buildings, based on long-period ground motion generation and propagation simulations by the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience and high-rise building response analysis by Kobori Research Complex.

Going forward, they will use the results of this research to develop insurance and derivative products and enhance risk consulting services, including business continuity planning (BCP), contributing to the creation of their customers’ risk management systems.

1. Seismic ground motion with a period longer than around 2 second

Results of analysis of energy spectrum (Vᴇ) distribution and velocity response spectrum (SV)
distribution, indicators of long-period ground motion (Sagami Trough Earthquake)

Risk Management for Global Business Operations

In response to the shrinking domestic market and intensifying price competition due to low birthrate and population aging, an increasing number of Japanese companies have begun to expand their overseas bases or consider new locations for expansion. On the other hand, as risks become more complex under the uncertain international climate, many companies are encountering crises overseas.

Sompo Risk Management supports the risk management activities of companies expanding into overseas markets by providing the Global Risk Management System Development Support Service, which identifies and assesses risks at overseas bases, the Overseas Subsidiary Management Risk Assessment Service, which diagnoses management risks at overseas bases from the perspective of governance, risk management, and compliance, the Overseas Risk Consulting Service, which includes Risk Management and Compliance Training for Overseas Bases and On-site Security Surveys, among other services. We also serve as a one-stop shop, providing a range of services related to overseas crisis management, including predictive analysis support and crisis response training, to meet the needs of customers who are expanding their businesses overseas.

Addressing Cyberattacks

We strive to solve social issues by turning cyber risks, which are difficult to visualize, into something tangible by using advanced technologies.

Cyber Insurance

Businesses play a key role in the economy, and in order to support their cybersecurity measures, Sompo Japan offers Cyber Insurance with expanded coverage for the cost of investigating the causes of leaks as well as lost profits, caused by digital data corruption, information leaks, and disconnection of network. In the event of an information leak or other incident, it is crucial to minimize losses, so urgent responses are increasingly important: Rapid investigation of the source and causes, and efforts to control the extent of losses. They have tied up with specialized businesses that provide this kind of support, and offer services to support smooth business recovery for all Cyber Insurance policy holders.

Optimized One-Stop Services Against Cyberattacks

Three key points

1. Escort
We conduct interviews, systemic diagnoses, and surveys to visualize the assets to be protected and potential risks, and help customers independently prioritize security measures.

2. Optimize
To take security measures that best fit your organization, it is important to identify, analyze, and evaluate risks, compare them to the value of what you need to protect, and prioritize them. We provide advanced solutions from Israel and other countries procured through our own channels, as well as various assessment and diagnostic services, in order to visualize risks in the digital domain, which are difficult to see, and to optimize costs and countermeasures.

3. Cyber security shift left
By incorporating the "shift-left" approach used in conventional software development into cyber security measures, we support proactive action at an early stage of cyber attacks.

Sequence of events in a cyber-attack

＜Organizational risk visualization support service＞

■Incident response
To respond to incidents caused by cyber-attacks such as unauthorized access and malware transmission, we provide incident response support to our customers based on our know-how in risk assessment and experience in insurance claims service.

■Investigation and diagnosis (security diagnosis)
Our engineers with a wealth of experience investigate and diagnose risks in IT infrastructure, using their deep expertise to cover a wide range of areas, including web applications, networks, and cloud services, as well as simple diagnostics and pseudo-penetration testing to meet various customer needs.

■Investigation and diagnosis (risk monitoring)
We provide services such as threat intelligence, supply chain cyber risk assessment, and other services that provide visibility and continuous monitoring of organizational risks by leveraging cutting-edge overseas solutions.

■Consulting
We provide compliance support for various information security regulations and risk assessments to gain an understanding of the current situation. By conducting a survey of the actual situation using technical methods, we are able to visualize potential risks.

■Training and exercises
To address systemic risks as well as the human vulnerabilities that come with it, we offer a variety of training and exercise services, customized according to the size and requirements of customer organizations.