As insurers scramble to get a clearer picture of catastrophic exposures, technology vendors are only too willing to offer products that make the carriers' jobs easier.
Anticipating catastrophic events and having a handle on their potential impact and costs are critical to insurer operations. The following are several relevant tools introduced or upgraded during the past year:
Pitney Bowes MapInfo, a global provider of location intelligence, recently introduced new data sets for the Risk Data Suite, a source of risk-related weather and other natural hazard information.
Among the new data sets being offered is a Wildfire Bundle, currently with information and exposure grids for California, which can be used to assess the proximity of property and assets to areas of potential wildfire risk, said Troy, N.Y.-based Pitney Bowes MapInfo.
The comprehensive Risk Data Suite weather peril and natural disaster database consists of bundles with high-definition data and aggregate exposure grids, the company explained. New bundles added to the Risk Data Suite include:
o Wildfire Bundle includes data from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The bundle depicts potential risk of wildfires based on historical data on both wild land and developed, urban zones.
o Fire Station Bundle contains information about each local fire station and department in the United States, including contact information, county served, type of department and number of stations. Also included are details about the location of specific personnel and equipment required in a geographical service area.
o Shoreline Bundle includes data captured from 270 National Ocean Service Navigation Charts, and spans more than 80,000 nautical miles used to determine distance to coast calculations for all coastal states on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Gulf of Mexico.
These new data sets are additions to the existing Risk Data Suite, which contains an Earthquake Bundle, Weather Bundle, Windpool Bundle and Mass Movement Bundle, said MapInfo.
Updates to the original bundles are also available, the company noted.
o The Mass Movement Bundle now includes information on sinkhole locations in Florida, including caves, disappearing streams, spring and underground drainage systems.
o Windpool Bundles, containing the historical information on wind speed and wind-borne debris regions, are now available for eight additional states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas.
"When used in conjunction with other Pitney Bowes MapInfo location intelligence technology, Risk Data Suite enables insurance risk managers to make better business decisions," the company stated.
Based on a site's exposure to severe weather, natural hazards and risk mitigators, the product can help address critical decisions in areas such as underwriting policy analyses and rating; custom rating territory creation and maintenance; credit and risk scoring; portfolio risk aggregation and realistic disaster scenario analyses; and claims planning and preparedness, said MapInfo.
"Risk Data Suite provides insurance risk managers with historical information about unpredictable weather or natural disasters to help them better prepare for future events," said Bill Sinn, global insurance manager at Pitney Bowes MapInfo.
"An unpredictable event, such as the recent wildfires in Southern California, is just one example of how historical data can help insurers limit and manage their liability and exposure to risks," he added. "Location intelligence technology helps determine insurance rates based on the frequency and severity of damage from natural disasters, perilous weather or extent of environmental hazards."
Pricing ranges from $3,000-to-$65,000, depending on the number of bundles purchased, number of users and length of contract, a company representative reported. Further details are available at www.mapinfo.com and www.pb.com.
Risk Management Solutions, a provider of products and services for catastrophe risk management, is announcing the RMS Account Fire Model, "a risk-decision tool supporting the underwriting process."
According to Newark, Calif.-based RMS, the Account Fire Model is a "physics-based probabilistic fire model, based on fire dynamics and engineering principles of hazard and vulnerability analysis. The model finally brings consistency and transparency to the process of developing fire premium."
The physical modeling of fire ignition, spreading and suppression in the RMS model is performed throughout a multistoried, multicompartment facility to obtain the full realization of the fire until it is extinguished or it self-extinguishes, said RMS. The model mimics the physical behavior of fire spread through a building via open doors or breached firewalls.
The hazard and suppression analysis is coupled with a fire-engineering-based assessment of the vulnerability of building, contents and business interruption, the company said. Before estimating damage, the fire is deemed to be a high or average challenge fire as defined by Underwriting Occupancy Class for the location.
"The analytics available in this release will help the underwriter and risk manager to develop an adequate premium to cover the appropriate level of risk for an account, and to develop an objective premium for facultative or excess layers," said RMS.
Prices for the RMS Account Fire Model range from $250,000-to-$2 million per year, depending on the configuration, a company representative noted.
EQECAT Inc., a subsidiary of ABSG Consulting Inc., announced the availability of Release 3.10 of EQECAT catastrophe modeling software, which includes its next generation model for Atlantic basin hurricanes.
"The storms of 2005 identified the critical need for insurers and reinsurers to adequately assess their exposure to losses from the combined effect of wind and flood," said Bob Healy, senior vice president of Oakland, Calif.-based EQECAT.
Release 3.10 includes numerous improvements based on research findings from storms during the last several seasons, said Mr. Healy. "We have applied the latest science available, thus providing a model with the best possible representation of Atlantic basin hurricane risk," he noted.
"Prudent assessment of the potential impact of climate change on risk is a critical industry issue," Mr. Healy continued. "The EQECAT model now provides a 'push button' option to view near-term risk throughout the Atlantic basin."
The EQECAT near-term risk view is based upon differentiating the frequency of storms occurring during historically observed warm and cool sea temperature cycles, known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, he added.
No pricing information was provided. Further details are available at www.eqecat.com.
AIR Worldwide Corp. announced Version 9.5 of its CLASIC/2, CATRADER and CATStation catastrophe risk management systems.
According to Boston-based AIR, the new version features import, analysis and export enhancements that "significantly improve performance and ease of use."
"Today, catastrophe model users need to run detailed analyses and view their results in multiple ways to better understand their underlying catastrophe risk," said Uday Virkud, senior vice-president at AIR. "In this release, we have focused on performance improvements so that our clients can derive the maximum benefit from our models during the short reinsurance renewal period."
The enhancements also reduce by 50 percent the time and system resources required to import exposure data into the catastrophe modeling system, the company said. A new utility allows users to import non-AIR exposure data files in Version 9.5 of CLASIC/2.
The company also said that a new geocoding engine is available for CLASIC/2 and CATStation that offers "significant improvements to processing speed while maintaining the accuracy of the geocoding results." The new technology is approximately twice as fast as the previous system, according to AIR.
Pricing information was not provided. Further details are available at www.air-worldwide.com.
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