Cat risk team of the Year – Aon, Impact Forecasting
Impact Forecasting has become a well-established name in the field of catastrophe modelling and the preceding year has brought a number of advances to solidify the reputation of the team.
The firm's Catastrophe Toolkit aims to provide catastrophe modellers, risk managers and re/insurance underwriters with solutions to help with insurance strategies, reinsurance pricing, enterprise risk management and catastrophe insight.
The key part of this toolkit is its ELEMENTS modelling platform, which addresses catastrophe modellers' need to play a more strategic role in emerging markets and wider product development.
"ELEMENTS gives insurers the ability to incorporate their own view of risk into model results," says Jakub Aska, business development executive at Impact Forecasting.
"Every step of the calculation process is clearly defined and outputs are clearly presentable to stakeholders, regulators and rating agencies, while helping to quantify the uncertainty in various model components."
During 2019, improvements to Impact Forecasting's offerings have included enhanced automated event responses for European windstorm and US hurricanes in a bid to provide loss projections in advance of a storm hitting.
Hail models coverage throughout mainland Europe has increased and now covers Germany, Austria and France among others, while its US hurricane and wildfire models have also been updated.
According to Aska, the updates have been driven by both clients and regulators.
"We work to provide modelling solutions for our clients but also are in constant communication with regulators about climate and natural catastrophe frequency and severity and how our models can help to quantify this," says Aska.
The toolkit has been put into practice on several occasions in 2019 including developing a tool specifically designed for one major insurer's terrorism exposure and risk management. The new model is designed to provide a more realistic understanding of the range of property and workers compensation losses resulting from terrorism attacks.
InsuranceERM's judges praised the "wide-ranging set of tools, well-adapted to help add value" that the team has developed and noted the team was "highly regarded and professional in their area".