Verisk Analytics Announces New Catastrophe Index

January 1, 2011 / 3 min read

JERSEY CITY, N.J., July 26, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Verisk Analytics, Inc. announces the launch of the Verisk Catastrophe Index (“the Index”), a new service providing highly granular loss estimates of insured property damage after catastrophes. Verisk Analytics is a leading provider of risk assessment solutions and an important participant in the insurance-linked capital markets through its Property Claim Services® (PCS®) and AIR Worldwide® (AIR) brands. The Index builds upon PCS’s 60 years of insured property loss estimation experience and AIR’s more than 20 years of catastrophe modeling expertise to generate reliable estimates of insured property losses by county and by line of business following PCS-designated catastrophes.

The Index allows for better tailoring of catastrophe risk transfer instruments while enhancing transparency thanks to its familiar loss-based trigger mechanism. By focusing coverage only on those counties and lines of business where they have exposure, cedents can reduce their basis risk and ensure that they pay only for the protection they need.

“The high resolution of the Index is particularly beneficial to regional and specialty insurers and reinsurers and for shedding peak risks from nationwide books of business,” said David Lalonde, FCAS, FCIA, MAAA, senior vice president at AIR Worldwide. “The Index also allows many new players to use industry loss-based insurance-linked securities to optimize their risk management strategy by tailoring protection to the precise counties and lines of business in which they are exposed.”

“We’ve provided industry estimates of insured losses following catastrophic events since 1949,” said Gary Kerney, assistant vice president at PCS. “Increasing the resolution of those estimates to individual counties will allow companies to estimate reserves more accurately, assign finite claims management resources where they are most needed, and increase the precision of their benchmarking by an order of magnitude.”

The Verisk Catastrophe Index relies on PCS’s network of insurer claim departments, insurance adjusters, emergency managers, insurance agents, meteorologists, and fire and police officials to estimate industrywide insurance payments for property lines of insurance in each state affected by a catastrophic event.

Using the physical parameters of the catastrophic events as reported by organizations such as the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Hurricane Center (NHC), AIR leverages its state-of-the-art catastrophe models and detailed database of insured industry exposure to distribute PCS state-level loss estimates by county. The Index estimates are then refined over time as updated PCS estimates and physical event parameters become available.

According to Vince McCarthy, senior vice president at Verisk Analytics, “The Index is currently available for U.S. hurricanes, and Verisk plans to expand it to additional perils in the future. The Index is designed for use by actuaries, underwriters, and claim professionals, in addition to participants in the insurance-linked securities markets.”

For more information on how the Verisk Catastrophe Index can help your business, please send e-mail to CatIndex@verisk.com.

About Verisk Analytics
Verisk Analytics is a leading provider of risk assessment solutions to professionals in insurance, healthcare, mortgage, government, and risk management. Using advanced technologies to collect and analyze billions of records, Verisk Analytics draws on vast industry expertise and unique proprietary data sets to provide predictive analytics and decision-support solutions in fraud prevention, actuarial science, insurance coverages, fire protection, catastrophe and weather risk, data management, and many other fields. In the United States and around the world, Verisk Analytics helps customers protect people, property, and financial assets.

Release: Immediate

Contacts:

Media
Rich Tauberman
MWW Group (for Verisk Analytics)
202-600-4546
rtauberman@mww.com

Investor Relations
Eva Huston, Head of Investor Relations
Verisk Analytics, Inc.
201-469-2142
eva.huston@verisk.com