Takeaways from Wint’s recent webinar with Scott Pipicelli (The Hanover Insurance Group) and John Stokes (HSB), moderated by Hayley Taylor (Wint).
In a recent Wint webinar, two people who spend their days thinking through water exposure talked through it: Scott Pipicelli, Technical Director for Marine and Risk Solutions at The Hanover Insurance Group, and John Stokes, Senior Vice President of Technology Risk Solutions at HSB.
The conversation kept returning to one idea: the device you install matters far less than the exposure you are protecting and the response you build around it. Here is what stood out.
Water is a frequency problem and a severity problem
Pipicelli was direct about where non-weather water and freeze sit against the perils that get more attention. Water damage is a leading loss source on both counts, across occupied properties, vacant properties, and buildings under construction, and he does not expect that to change.
A serious water claim can touch warehouse legal liability, stock, property of others, electronic data processing equipment, and business interruption. A water loss in a high-rise boutique hotel plays out very differently than one in an office where staff can work remotely for a week. Occupancy, number of stories, interior finishes, and the commodities inside all move the number.
There is also a cost that doesn’t show up on the loss run. If you have promised a customer a dry, secure environment and you fail to deliver it, the reputational hit can outweigh the insured loss. As Pipicelli put it, the stakes reach past insurance to whether a company stays profitable.
Why water is different from a hurricane
With a catastrophic peril like a hurricane or tornado, you can prepare, but what happens next is largely out of anyone’s hands. Stokes highlighted that water behaves differently. The warning signs tend to arrive early and in ways you can act on: moisture appearing where it should not be, abnormal flow that runs longer than it should, temperatures dropping in a hard-to-reach part of a building.
That early window is where technology is essential. A sensor and a monitoring system create visibility, and the visibility lets someone turn up the heat, shut off the water, or escalate an alert to a person who can respond quickly. On its own, the hardware does little. The value comes from pairing that hardware with a platform that offers the visibility needed to change behavior before a small issue becomes a large claim. Water is one of the few perils a carrier can influence rather than simply price for, and only when the technology is wired to a real response model.
Both speakers landed on the same two words: recognition and response. An alert that nobody owns is not mitigation. The goal is prompt notification followed by a confirmed action. If one idea ran through the whole session, it was this. Pipicelli called recognition and response the two most critical steps in any water mitigation plan, and both speakers kept coming back to it.
The reason is simple: the size of a water claim depends heavily on time. Pipicelli pointed out that every loss is shaped by how much water flowed, how long it flowed, and how long it took between the event and the response. Technology shortens the first part of that gap by sending prompt notification. But an alert is only the start. As Pipicelli put it, the goal isn’t a situation where there’s a water leak and no one responds. A good plan confirms that someone actually acted.
Stokes made the same point from the carrier side. Water is one of the few perils an insurer can influence, but only when the technology is connected to a response model. That means deciding in advance who receives the alert, who is next if they don’t answer, who can get into the building, and who has the authority to shut the water off, including after hours, on weekends, and on holidays. An alert that nobody owns is not mitigation.
What a freeze event looks like in live data
The discussion turned to Winter Storm Fern, which spread snow, ice, and prolonged below-freezing temperatures across more than 30 states in late January, reaching deep into places like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas that rarely see this kind of cold. Estimates put insured property and auto losses between four and seven billion dollars, with freeze damage the biggest driver.
Pipicelli shared a smaller, more vivid version of the same story. Friends of his were away for four days when an uninsulated pipe above the garage froze and let go. A neighbor called to say the front of the house looked like an ice luge. Water had run through the house and down the driveway the whole time they were gone.
Stokes made the case for learning about an event like that through live sensor data instead of claims files. A claims file mostly tells you facts after the loss: that there was damage, roughly when it was found, and what it cost. Live data, however, shows the sequence that led up to it: temperatures falling across a portfolio, which geographies became danger zones, and which alerts went out, which were acknowledged, and where someone acted.
Buildings can file the same freeze claim with very different circumstances. One had no warning at all. One had alerts that weren’t acknowledged. A third caught it partway and reduced the severity. Not every alert represents a loss avoided, but every alert is a documented chance to step in, and over time that record is worth a great deal to a carrier.
Sorting the technology by the problem it solves
From the carrier’s seat, Pipicelli groups the water technology that crosses his desk into three buckets:
- Flow monitoring, which watches water moving through the pipes and flags normal or abnormal flow, sometimes paired with automatic or remote shutoff (for example, water that should never run between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m.).
- Point, or spot, detection such as floor pucks and ropes, which tell you water has reached a place it should not be, often in high-hazard areas.
- Ambient monitoring of temperature and humidity, which matters because the leak itself is sometimes less damaging than the humidity that follows and feeds mold, contamination, and spoiled goods.
His advice for choosing among them was to start with the problem, then pick the product. A high-rise tower and a two-story elementary school do not need the same level of coverage, and no single solution fits construction, occupied, and vacant buildings alike.
Stokes described point detection and flow monitoring as complementary rather than competing. Point detection answers a specific condition in a specific place, moisture under a sink, temperature in a room full of critical equipment, a freeze-prone corner, and it is low cost and easy to deploy. Flow monitoring takes the system-wide view, catching unusual use across the whole network and, in many installations, escalating fast or shutting the water off. For a mechanical room, point detection may be enough. For a broader system failure that is harder to see, flow monitoring is the stronger tool. In higher-value, multi-use properties, the answer is usually both.
Where the deals get hard
The hardest sell, Pipicelli said, is walking into a construction project that has already started. By then the drawings are stamped, the mechanical and fire-suppression contractors are hired, and the valves are sitting in a warehouse waiting to be installed. Everyone’s first questions are the practical ones: who owns it, who pays for it, who installs it, who monitors it, who responds.
The conversations that work happen earlier, at the risk-management or executive level, ideally before construction begins. Get in early and you can specify the system once, sign off once, procure once, and run the outlets you need for automatic shutoffs. You can set response protocols, name the people and phone numbers, and sort out who absorbs the cost with the eventual owner. There is an underwriting benefit too: telling your agent or carrier up front that the technology will be in place, and that you know how to use it, helps with risk selection even if it is not a straight line to a lower price.
Looking three years out
Asked what will be different in three years, Pipicelli expects the fundamentals to hold. Risk selection and pricing will still turn on the customer’s risk tolerance, loss history, and commitment to prevention. As the technology becomes a more regular part of the conversation among policyholders, agents, and carriers, he expects better terms for the end user, provided owners commit to preventing water damage in the first place. Sensing technology, he stressed, is one piece of a broader plan that starts with maintenance and quality control.
Stokes sees carriers getting more targeted. The technology is evolving but no longer new, and after several years of broad pilots the market is matching specific solutions to specific exposures and operating environments. His one piece of advice for a carrier at the start of this was the thread running through the whole session: do not start with the device. Start with the loss you want to prevent, understand the exposure, decide what action has to happen, and choose the technology that supports that outcome. Define ownership and measurement before deployment, which is what keeps a program from stalling out as one more pilot that goes nowhere.
That is the throughline from both speakers: choose technology for the exposure, pair detection with a response plan with a clear owner, and water becomes a risk you can act on rather than one you wait to pay for.
Watch the full session recording here: https://wint.ai/webinars/hsb-hanover/
