InsuranceERM's risk innovation of the year category is always hotly contested – a testament to the insurance industry's drive to digitalise and incorporate new technologies like artificial intelligence.

In the catastrophe modelling sector, the pressure has been on firms to improve the detail and speed of risk assessments. RMS, one of the sector's market leaders, has been driving progress and its achievements have resulted in InsuranceERM's judges awarding it risk innovation of the year.

In 2021, for example, RMS announced innovations to its ExposureIQ application, including real-time catastrophe event visualisations, more powerful reporting and new capabilities to allow cross-portfolio accumulations across re/insurance workflows.

ExposureIQ is a cloud-based exposure management application designed to help portfolio managers gain deeper insights into their books. It provides direct access to exposure information, using event footprints from RMS's Event Response service, and real-time forecasting capabilities from RMS HWind, to help gain a quicker and more accurate assessment of potential losses before, during and after an event.

Insurers need to view their complete portfolio, not a siloed one that prevents them from examining all potential losses. InsuranceERM's judges were impressed the ExposureIQ application offers a market solution that can manage both reinsurance and insurance workflows in one application.

The InsuranceERM award caps a busy year for RMS. The firm was acquired by risk management solutions vendor Moody's in September 2021.

RMS's global head of business development Michael Steel tells InsuranceERM that by working together with Moody's, RMS is continuing to invest in climate change and cyber risk management, and across all its products and services.

Steel says RMS is also committed to developing Intelligent Risk Platform, its open-standard risk modelling platform through which ExposureIQ is available.