New ISO Service Helps Insurers Identify and Compete in New Markets

January 1, 2011 / 2 min read

NEW YORK, June 7, 1999 – Insurance Services Office, Inc. (ISO) has unveiled a market-research information product to help its underwriting and marketing customers identify new, promising markets for business development.

Scoreboard Summary Report helps facilitate decision-making on insurance market segments by allowing users to compare economic, demographic, and insurance experience of a variety of business segments. In compact-disc format, Scoreboard gives insurance marketing researchers a variety of economic, demographic, and insurance data for virtually all industries. Leveraging data in ISO's vast 5.5-billion-record database, Scoreboard reports provide insurers with both state and countrywide information to facilitate sound market-segment decision-making.

"Scoreboard reports are unique in that they provide a multidimensional view of promising business niches," said James Surrago, ISO's vice president – management and information services. "With Scoreboard reports, underwriting and marketing specialists involved in market-segmentation research will no longer have to rely on the limits of their own company's data, or data from a purchased model, or even guesswork to evaluate the potential profitability of a prospective market segment," Surrago said.

The centerpiece of Scoreboard information is ISO's aggregated commercial experience for fire, general liability, and businessowners policies. This data is presented as loss-ratio rankings (with underlying ranges) for Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes used by the federal government to identify multiple types of businesses. The Scoreboard information package also includes demographic data from the U.S. Economic Census, such as the number and sizes of establishments in an industry, total number of employees, and payroll and growth data calculated from these measures.

"In the continuing soft market, market segmentation has become a critical marketing strategy for most insurers," said Surrago. "Many companies are devoting considerable resources to find new potential market segments and to re-evaluate their current market-segment programs."

"Insurers have told us they want actual experience data to replace their own 'hit-or-miss' results," Surrago said.

Scoreboard provides:

Loss experience information based on ISO's large, credible volume of statistical information;
Data that is already mapped to federal government Standard Industrial Classification codes or industry segments;
Insurance data based on statistics as reported, instead of modeled data;
Ranking of market segments based on loss ratio and loss severity that will allow users, using their own judgment, to quickly identify target industries; and
Demographic data packaged with loss-experience data that spares insurers the expense of acquiring and formatting demographic information from other sources.

Scoreboard includes a function that filters out industries and Standard Industrial Classifications that fail to meet criteria established by users.

For more information contact ISO's Customer Service Department at (800) 888-4476.

Release: Immediate

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