As reinsurance brokers roll out computerized catastrophe management tools to their insurer clients, unexpected side benefits are emerging, allowing carriers to dream up applications that extend well beyond making decisions about reinsurance–such as tracking agent profitability and mobilizing claims adjusters.

The new tools were essentially designed to allow insurers to see the locations of the risks they write plotted on maps, and to analyze geographic accumulations and proximities to catastrophic hazards and terrorism targets, according to developers at two separate reinsurance brokers.

But there are hidden benefits of these tools to unleash the untapped powers of the underlying data that gets put into the models, according to both Frank Pierson, senior vice president and chief technical officer for Holborn in New York, and Lara Mowery, a managing director for Guy Carpenter based in Minneapolis, who separately demonstrated their wares to NU earlier this year.