Your loss ratio moves on decisions being made at insured properties, by people your program has never met. Jon makes the case that maintenance teams are the single biggest controllable variable behind most claims.

Most owners assume a commercial roof lasts 20 years. The warranty often requires someone to walk it every six months, clear debris, and check for punctures. When that stops, the warranty can be void and the roof can fail years early. Nothing in the underwriting file shows the walks stopped.

When results deteriorate, the responses available are price, exclusions, and non-renewal. Jon calls that a means to an unsustainable end, since none of the three change what happens at the property before the next renewal.

The maintenance labor shortage compounds this. When that role sits empty, no one at the property is managing risk at all.

Topics discussed include:

• The roughly 60% of policyholder maintenance operations Jon says still run on pen and paper, and why that makes deployment easier than programs assume
• How structured maintenance changes both claim frequency and severity, and the 10X ROI HelixIntel reports in year one, with higher results in some public entity pools
• Why sensors and telematics underdeliver when there is no operational workflow ready to receive the alert
• What happens to policyholder retention when the program provides the software they run their day inside
• Extending the model to commercial auto through fleet maintenance and inspection compliance

Guest Speaker: John DeWald, Helix Intel

Jon DeWald is CEO and co-founder of HelixIntel, a Buffalo-based insurtech company backed by Munich Re, HSB, and National Grid Partners. A Hamburg, NY native and decorated Marine Corps veteran (2001-2005), Jon is a serial entrepreneur who spent over a decade building and running maintenance and energy services companies before founding HelixIntel, his fifth startup. Seeing firsthand how maintenance teams struggled while insurers kept paying for losses that better maintenance could have prevented, he built HelixIntel’s shared platform to connect both sides of that problem for the first time.

Jon writes and speaks regularly on maintenance and risk, with bylines in Carrier Management and Insurance Thought Leadership, and is a regular guest on industry podcasts. HelixIntel is a member of TMPAA, The Insurance Information Institute, the NVIDIA Inception program, and the Endeavor network, and works with program administrators, pools, and carriers across the country.