Insurers are becoming increasingly exposed to natural perils as climate change makes weather events more frequent and intense.

The data backs this up with 2022 being one of the costliest years on record for those underwriting natural catastrophe risk.

Picking up the data solution of the year award, Impact Forecasting, the catastrophe modelling team of broker Aon, has reacted to this growing natural catastrophe exposure with its Impact Forecast Underwriting Data Service (UDS).

"The solution provides instant access to location level hazards, such as flood depth or wind gusts, and risk information based on maps from Impact Forecasting's catastrophe models", explains Sarka Cerna, head of client solutions at Aon Impact Forecasting.

This UDS can be used by insurers in risk selection and rate making to help provide fast data-driven quoting processes, Cerna adds. Also, the platform is equipped with an application programming interface (API) for easy integration to any system.

It also helps re/insures deal with the need for huge datasets of hundreds of gigabytes of data- often too large for an underwriter's pricing workflow.

Instead, the UDS is able to find the appropriate data set, extract the risk value and then return the needed information to the underwriter instantly.

Looking ahead, Cerna said Aonis "working on further performance improvements by leveraging server-less design on the cloud".

She added Aon also aims to integrate more models so that the platform can readily offer the hazard and risk information for all Impact Forecasting's models covering more than 12 perils and 80 territories.