As insurers look to develop their product and pricing strategies, Impact Forecasting's underwriting data service (UDS) has continued to expand its range of hazard and risk datasets and this innovation has helped it to retain this InsuranceERM award.

UDS consists of underwriting datasets, calculated using Impact Forecasting's catastrophe models, for any peril or territory that provides information about hazard intensity for a given location (such as flood depth, wind gust), irrespective of the property characteristics.

Deployment of UDS leads to more effective and accurate risk selection for insurers, and Impact Forecasting, the catastrophe modelling team of broker Aon, says firms from across the world are now actively using it.

In the past 12 months, Impact Forecasting developed new hosted infrastructure for UDS, leveraging the Microsoft Azure cloud to enable smoother and faster processing and increased security.

Clients using UDS can now benefit from new ways of consuming flood maps, technical premiums and other datasets while the offering also allows for integration with any other software or system.

"Whilst the primary functionality remains the same – instant location level hazard/risk assessment – the user experience, performance, reliability and security was massively improved," Sarka Cerna, head of client solutions at Aon Impact Forecasting, says about the upgrades to UDS.

Cerna says the upgrades are in response to clients becoming increasingly concerned with security, especially regarding hosted solutions which they are integrating with their own.

Cerna also notes a "perceivable shift towards hosted solutions and cloud in general" has taken place despite the insurance sector taking more time than others to reach this point.

"Now this trend is here and we need to make sure our offering aligns with client needs," says Cerna.

"UDS was the first of our software solutions to undergo a massive technology upgrade to ensure it fits in current era, but we are not stopping there at all – stay tuned!"