Texas Department of Insurance taps ISO for new stat plan

December 17, 2020 / 3 min read

State regulators often require insurers to submit claims and loss data following a catastrophe. The goal is to help them understand how a catastrophe affected policyholders and insurers, and how the event could impact the insurance industry.

These special data calls tend to be ad-hoc, occurring on a catastrophe-by-catastrophe basis. In Texas, this ad-hoc approach made it more challenging to swiftly gather and analyze catastrophe data. To help standardize and formalize its approach to catastrophe reporting, the Texas Department of Insurance(TDI) created the new Texas Catastrophe Event Statistical Plan for Personal and Commercial Risks, and they’ve selected ISO, a Verisk business, to serve as the statistical agent for the new plan. In that role, ISO will collect catastrophe data and submit aggregate reports to the TDI on behalf of insurers.

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Bringing high-quality data to bear on catastrophic events

With the new Catastrophe Event Statistical Plan, the TDI will be looking to gauge the health of the insurance market following a catastrophe and provide information about the impact of catastrophic events to policymakers. The new plan will enable the TDI to generate better comparisons across catastrophes since the data collected will now be consistent between events. The TDI will also be able to perform complex analyses on catastrophic events more quickly.¹

ISO and Texas

ISO has been the commercial lines statistical agent for Texas since 1996, delivering roughly 100 reports a year from over 600 insurers. ISO processes about 75 million transaction-level data records annually from these insurers.

ISO doesn't just process data. We've put in place strict quality and security controls to help ensure the data is valid, reliable, secure, and consistent. These include:

Automated quality checks to ensure reporting fields are properly filled out
Reasonability tests to confirm the data is consistent and coherent
Customer training and ongoing support for corrections
Quality checks on aggregated data that include, where appropriate, the judgment of actuaries, actuarial analysts, and insurance data managers
Security procedures reviewed by regulators and audited by independent firms

A trusted resource for statistical data collection

As an appointed statistical agent in 54 jurisdictions for 17 property and casualty lines of insurance (with minor exceptions), ISO has deep expertise in delivering both scheduled and special data calls and building the technological infrastructure to produce high-quality data. We process roughly 4.5 billion insurance records every year to prepare over 800 annual data reports for state insurance departments and regulators—all while applying rigorous quality and security checks.

Since 2016, we’ve also served as the terrorism risk insurance data aggregator for the U.S. Department of Treasury to help it analyze the effectiveness of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program. We work closely with regulators and insurers at all levels to address questions and provide them with the data and expertise needed to help regulators formulate policy and to help insurers stay compliant with reporting requirements. If there’s an insurance question that regulators want to address, chances are we have the data and analytical expertise to help.

To learn more about how ISO can provide statistical data reporting and analysis, please contact me at: Joseph.Izzo@Verisk.com.

“Title 28 Insurance,” Texas Department of Insurance, 2020, < https://www.tdi.texas.gov/rules/2020/documents/20206467.pdf >, accessed on December 15, 2020.