Knowledge is power: The case for ISO Market Landscape & ISO DataCube

December 14, 2021 / 3 min read

Scientia potentia est.

From Latin, this translates to "knowledge is power"—a well-known principle that has survived through the ages and still carries weight for both academics and professionals alike. And that power comes from data.

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It’s common for many insurers to measure underwriting success based on past performance. But a key question is—how are you doing relative to the rest of the industry?

Whether you’re determining what’s next for your business, deciding to enter or exit a market, or looking to benchmark your portfolio against overall market performance—data gives you the power that sets you on the right path.

ISO Market Landscape™ and ISO DataCube^® can provide insurers with critical insights into their competitive positions and opportunities. Whether you’re writing property, auto, or liability coverage, Verisk has solutions that can help your business harness the power of our insightful data.

How do you know what you don’t know?

It’s common for many insurers to measure underwriting success based on past performance. But a key question is—how are you doing relative to the rest of the industry? Sometimes, the answer comes from a broader view of your performance. By relying only on internal data, you could miss what’s happening in the market. Instead, by shifting perspective to an outside-looking-in approach, you can understand the broader picture to help determine what growth opportunities you may be missing.

ISO Market Landscape is an interactive dashboard that lets insurers benchmark their results against Verisk’s property/casualty database—one of the largest in the world. Companies that report statistical data to ISO can compare their information to the aggregated data for all reporting companies.

The power of ISO Market Landscape stems from its ability to visually highlight opportunities for improvement. Insurers can look at loss ratios, frequency, and severity nationally, on a state level, or even a substate level. Users can generate scatterplots to show which classes of business have the best combination of volume and profitability.

ISO Market Landscape lets you easily see how your risk portfolio compares with those of your peers and look for areas where you might want to make adjustments or expand your book of business.

The more you know, the more power you have

The power of external data isn’t limited to portfolio benchmarking. Robust premium and loss data is an essential analytic tool that can help support ratemaking, underwriting, strategic planning, and product development.

ISO DataCube provides granularity and flexibility to compare opportunities across subclasses at the ZIP code and specific peril levels, with supporting metrics like loss ratio, severity, and frequency. These metrics can help decisionmakers see the broader picture when evaluating markets and geographies, allowing you to better evaluate profitability, assess the likelihood of an event, and the average cost of a claim.

ISO DataCube can be used to help in pricing, support in rate filings, or to reinforce credibility.

Together, ISO Market Landscape and ISO DataCube allow insurers to view data on macro and micro levels, comparing their internal data to a sizable portion of the industry. They also allow insurers to evaluate across states and lines of business, including areas where they don’t currently operate. With a better view of information aggregated in a consistent format, insurers can make better decisions based on risk appetite and other considerations.

More data = more power

We’re always listening to customer feedback and looking to make enhancements to the products, whether it’s to include more classes of business or add more fields. For example, because of customer comments, ISO Market Landscape was enhanced to include severity and frequency. In 2020, we added ZIP code level detail to ISO DataCube for commercial property and commercial auto.

We also want you to have the most up-to-date information possible, so we are working on semi-annual updates for ISO DataCube, phasing in a mid-year update of the data by line of business. We provided this update for homeowners and personal auto data this year, and commercial auto and businessowners data are slated to follow in 2022.

Knowledge is the path to power—and together, ISO Market Landscape and ISO DataCube provide the knowledge you need to be powerful.