BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Karen Clark & Company (KCC) today announced the release of the RI4 update to the RiskInsight® open loss modeling platform. The update includes enhanced global mapping capabilities, more detailed and interactive underwriter and CEO dashboards, and significantly advanced model-building tools.
In RI4, insurers and reinsurers can build hurricane and earthquake models anywhere in the world by adding custom event catalogs and damage functions appropriate for specific peril regions. RiskInsight’s model-building tools, HazardMapper™ and DamageRatesManager™, have been enhanced in RI4 to make it easier for model builders to create high resolution probabilistic catastrophe models reflecting their own knowledge, expertise and views of risk.
“External stakeholders, such as rating agencies and regulators, now expect (re)insurers to take ownership of the risk and not just rely on third party model output,” said Glen Daraskevich, KCC Senior Vice President. “RI4 is the most efficient platform for companies to fully understand, customize and control their catastrophe model assumptions. Only with the full transparency available in RiskInsight can companies truly verify the credibility of the information driving their loss estimates.”
RI4 includes detailed global soil maps and terrain datasets covering all countries and territories. Modeling experts can simply select the scientific intensity formulas most appropriate for the specific peril region from a dropdown box. For example, RI4 includes dozens of earthquake attenuation functions incorporating the collective scientific expertise on ground motion for all types of seismic sources.
The RI4 financial module has global application and is operational for all peril regions. To create a new model, an event catalog and set of damage functions are all that’s required. Advanced modeling experts can build and customize new models in a matter of weeks.
“We’ve already started building catastrophe models on the RiskInsight open loss modeling platform, and RI4 promises to make that process even more efficient,” said Eric Letourneau, Senior Vice President, QBE Group. “A dynamic global company like QBE requires transparent models and the most advanced tools for our pricing and risk management decisions. It’s still the early stage, but RI4 RiskInsight could represent a significant innovation in the catastrophe modeling space.”
RI4 makes it straightforward for insurers to refine the model damage functions utilizing their own claims data and other information. Insurers can directly access and refine the Reference Model damage functions to produce closer alignment between modeled and actual loss experience.
“The catastrophe model damage functions are expressed as the ratio of the financial loss to a property divided by the replacement value of that property,” said Mr. Daraskevich. “But each insurer has different insurance-to-value assumptions, policy conditions, and claims handling practices. This means that the damage to a specific property will result in a different claim and loss amount depending on which insurer underwrites the property.”
The RiskInsight exposure analytics have also been significantly enhanced with RI4. With just a few clicks, underwriters can generate custom dashboards reports, including interactive maps of exposures and market shares, data quality scores, and dozens of histograms illustrating construction, occupancy, year built, and other metrics. The 100 year Characteristic Event (CE) profiles—unique to RiskInsight—are automatically displayed on the dashboard reports. These profiles enable underwriters to quickly see the correlations in their portfolios.
The RI4 maps are fast and interactive so underwriters can zoom in to see increasingly higher resolution data down to individual locations. Data can be aggregated at different levels of geographic resolution and compared across different time periods.
“We’ve listened very carefully to our clients, and RI4 is designed for modeling experts who want full transparency on model assumptions and the flexibility to build sophisticated custom models efficiently and scientifically,” said Karen Clark, KCC co-founder and CEO. “We’re extremely pleased and excited to deliver such a powerful innovation and to be working with industry leaders who are ready to implement the new generation of open loss models and risk management tools.”
About Karen Clark & Company
Karen Clark & Company provides software products and consulting services that help insurance companies better understand and manage catastrophe risk. Karen Clark & Company professionals are independent experts in catastrophe risk, catastrophe models, and catastrophe risk management who work with insurance company executives to enhance business strategies, competitive advantage and financial results. For more information, please visit www.karenclarkandco.com.