Impact Forecasting is Aon's catastrophe model development centre of excellence and enables clients to analyse the financial implications of catastrophic events and achieve a greater understanding of their risks.

The team has evolved traditional catastrophe modelling for reinsurance, to underwriting, new product development and automated accumulation control, which all assist insurers in taking a holistic catastrophe modelling approach.

In recent times, the company has also launched new hazard and risk datasets to continually expand its product, adding more peril-regions, with Germany flood datasets being one of the latest additions.

The basis of the service are the underwriting datasets calculated using Impact Forecasting's catastrophe model for any peril or territory. The hazard dataset provides information about hazard intensity for a given location, which is combined with risk datasets to distinguish between different property characteristics.

The combinations of parameters and the use of a high-resolution catastrophe model can result in a huge dataset of hundreds of gigabytes of data – often too large and cumbersome for an underwriter's pricing workflow. To overcome this barrier Impact Forecasting launched the Underwriting Data Service (UDS).

The UDS provides clients with instant access to reliable hazard and risk information on location level based on Aon Impact Forecasting's probabilistic cat models. The service can also be deployed on a customer's infrastructure or cloud, as well as through a fully hosted solution by Impact Forecasting.

Sarka Cerna, head of client solutions at Aon Impact Forecasting, says the UDS outputs can be customised to provide information about a particular client and the platform seamlessly integrates via API with their systems. Cerna says: "Having all these inputs at hand allows them to focus on making the right decisions during underwriting and catastrophe risk management."