ISO Introduces New Tsunami, Lava, and Premium Tax Services

January 1, 2011 / 2 min read

JERSEY CITY, N.J., January 27, 2010 — ISO announces the launch of several new geographic services inside its LOCATION and LOCATION Analyst product suites. The new services include:

LOCATION Tsunami Service – indicates whether the property is within the Tsunami Evacuation Zone defined by the state of Hawaii.

LOCATION Lava Service – provides lava-flow hazard zone information for the five volcanoes on the island of Hawaii. Lava-flow hazard zones are based on the location of past eruptive events, past lava coverage, and topography. They are designed to show relative hazard across the island of Hawaii. For example, Zone 1 (most hazardous) includes summits and rift zones of Kilauea and Mauna Loa, where vents have been repeatedly active in historic time and where lava flows originate.

LOCATION Premium Tax Service for Delaware, Mississippi, and South Carolina – provides the appropriate tax code and territory name, the lines of business subject to premium tax, the tax rate, and the revision date.

LOCATION is the most widely used GIS underwriting database in the U.S. property/casualty industry, with more than 150 insurer customers, including eight of the ten largest carriers. The industry standard for 15 years, LOCATION provides address-specific underwriting and rating information on Public Protection Classification (PPCTM), natural catastrophe hazards, windpools, wildfire assessment, building code enforcement grading, nine insurance line-specific rating territories, crime assessment, flood zone determination, premium taxing districts, and many custom geographic layers for insurers.

LOCATION Analyst is a spatial risk-management software system that enables insurers to combine GIS technology, information from their own policy portfolios, and proprietary ISO data to explore and analyze their business. Using LOCATION Analyst, insurers can identify insureds near high-risk areas or natural hazards, target new areas of opportunity, analyze property based on custom-defined risk levels, and investigate concentration of policies based on unique, user-defined risk profiles.

“ISO takes its stewardship of the industry’s standard GIS tools very seriously,” said Bill Raichle, vice president, Risk Decision Information at ISO. “The new tsunami, lava, and premium tax services expand the product suite and demonstrate our continued commitment to providing additional value for our customers,” added Raichle.

About ISO
Since 1971, ISO has been a leading source of information about property/casualty insurance risk. For a broad spectrum of commercial and personal lines of insurance, the company provides statistical, actuarial, underwriting, and claims information; policy language; information about specific locations; fraud-identification tools; and technical services. ISO serves insurers, reinsurers, agents and brokers, insurance regulators, risk managers, and other participants in the property/casualty insurance marketplace. ISO is a subsidiary of Verisk Analytics.

Release: Immediate

Contacts:
Giuseppe Barone / Erica Helton
MWW Group (for ISO)
201-507-9500
gbarone@mww.com / ehelton@mww.com