How Hiscox Is Rewriting the Rules of US Flood Insurance

James Brady, Property Divisional Director at Hiscox London Market, and Tom King, the firm’s Flood line underwriter, joined the Voice of Insurance podcast to mark 10 years of Flood Plus, the market-first, tech-enabled quote-and-bind product that has grown into the largest flood book at Lloyd’s.

Speaking to host Mark Geoghegan, Brady and King traced Flood Plus from a cross-sell idea on Hiscox’s homeowners book to a standalone platform now trading close to 100,000 digital quotes a week. Their conversation lands at a pointed moment: since the episode was recorded, the Trump administration’s review of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has recommended risk-based pricing and a take-out programme to shift National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) policies toward the private market. With US flood penetration still stuck at around 4%, the runway Brady and King describe is one of the largest underwriting opportunities left in the market.

A Gap Too Big to Ignore

The idea for Flood Plus grew out of a simple observation. Hiscox already insured wind, fire, and earthquake through its personal lines book, and when the US private flood market began opening up, the team asked why they couldn’t do the same for water. “There’s systematic flaws with [the NFIP] in terms of reduced limits, restrictive coverage,” King said. “If we can create a product that agents want to sell, insurers want to buy, and will ultimately pay at claims time… that was the challenge we took on.”

The scale of the gap is striking. FEMA reports that 99% of US counties have experienced flooding in the past 20 years, yet only around 4% of homeowners carry flood cover. Of 80 to 90 million single-family homes in the US, Brady noted, just 6 to 7 million buy flood insurance. “Therein lies both the problem and the opportunity,” he said.

Tested Early, and Built to Scale

Flood books rarely get an easy start, and Flood Plus was no exception. Hurricane Harvey struck in the product’s first year, hitting a book still concentrated in Texas. “In true Hiscox fashion, there was belief in the plan,” King said. Rather than retreating, the team treated Harvey as a catalyst, using the lessons to diversify and grow. A decade on, roughly two-thirds of the portfolio sits more than 10 miles from the coast, with Florida’s coastal exposure balanced against inland risk in states like California.

A fully digital, API-driven platform underpins that diversification, handling quoting, binding, cancellation, renewal, reinstatement, and endorsement, and distributing through MGAs and cover holders across the US, supported by London brokers. The numbers are hard to ignore: four underwriters and one pricing lead in London currently support close to 100,000 quotes a week. “You just could not possibly do that [any other way],” Brady said.

Yet the human element hasn’t disappeared. King recalled a cover-holder partner who, after Hurricane Ian cut off access to Sanibel Island, simply bought a boat to reach affected policyholders and get claims moving. “We talk so much about all the things that digital and API is unlocking,” he said. “I’d like to see AI go and get a boat to sail over and reassure the customers.”

Precision as Underwriting Discipline

Where the NFIP prices more broadly, Brady described Flood Plus’s approach as precise by design, capable of returning a technical price for almost any US location and managing exposure down to a street, zip code, or drainage basin. “It’s about diversification and the exposure as we scale,” he said. That discipline has allowed Hiscox to expand into ex-zone products for lower-hazard customers at more accessible price points, while also raising limits for higher-value risks, broadening the book in both directions without losing control of aggregation.

Complementing the NFIP, Not Just Competing with It

Brady was careful to frame Flood Plus as filling gaps rather than simply undercutting the federal programme, which is carrying a cumulative deficit now running to $22–23bn. The two markets, King explained, “have different views of risk… similar, but different,” and often sit side by side rather than head-to-head. Increasingly, that means excess placements: insureds hold an NFIP policy and buy Flood Plus on top of it to reach full indemnity as rebuild costs outpace the NFIP’s static residential and commercial limits. “We can complement the NFIP as well,” King said. “I think we can all grow.”

Where AI Fits, and Where It Doesn’t

Both guests were candid that AI has become part of daily conversation at Hiscox, but always as an augmentation of underwriting judgement rather than a replacement for it. Hiscox now uses large language models to cleanse statements of values, run slip-to-slip comparisons, and ingest years of survey reports across complex, multi-location risks, flagging how a location’s exposure has trended over time. Work, Brady says, that would historically have taken 24, 48 hours and now minutes. On claims, similar tools help flag losses likely to escalate if left unattended.

What AI hasn’t changed is where the real decisions sit. “Human judgment is always going to matter,” King said, particularly on aggregation, capital deployment, and portfolio strategy. The gain, both agreed, is capacity: a lean team trading at genuine scale, freed up to focus on the risks and broker relationships that matter most.

Why This Matters Now

For an industry watching NFIP reform take shape, Flood Plus offers a decade of evidence that a precisely underwritten, digitally distributed flood product can be built profitably alongside the federal scheme rather than only in competition with it. The lesson for carriers eyeing the flood opportunity, or any high-volume, data-intensive line, is that first-mover advantage buys time but not complacency: continued investment in data quality, exposure management, and technology is what turns an early lead into a lasting one. With 96% of the US flood market still unprotected, and reform pushing more risk toward the private sector, the opportunity Brady and King describe is only opening up further.

Listen to the full episode of Voice of Insurance with James Brady and Tom King to hear more on underwriting philosophy, mitigation that actually works, and why Hiscox isn’t ruling out taking Flood Plus beyond the US.