Cat risk team of the year: Impact Forecasting ELEMENTS
Through its collaborative efforts Impact Forecasting, Aon Benfield's catastrophe model development team, has provided a streamlined solution for catastrophe modellers, risk managers and re/insurance underwriters to manage their catastrophe modelling workflows.
Among its latest offerings, Impact Forecasting has released flood models for Brazil and Slovakia along with typhoon, flood and earthquake models for Vietnam. It has also developed a model to help the Icelandic Catastrophe Pool, ICI, make catastrophe reinsurance decisions.
In the US it has updated its river flood modelling to include over 110,000 stochastic events, including 2017's catastrophes, with freely available in-season event footprints. Elsewhere it has extended its European windstorm model coverage to include Austria and Scandinavia along with the previously un-modelled peril coverage of forestry.
Closer to home, the team has also expanded its third-party model coverage including JBA's UK flood model to enable insurers and reinsurers access to other model providers and provide greater choice.
These steps have all been taken to help insurers develop their product and pricing strategies. Following intense flooding in Canada in 2013, Impact Forecasting released a Canadian flood model to better understand the impact of flooding to insurer's portfolio. Now 20 insurers and reinsurers are licensing and using Impact Forecasting's flood hazard and risk models to understand accumulations on their portfolios.
The team also hopes to deliver greater catastrophe insight through delivery of free event footprints, for example, following Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in the US and Caribbean, and the recent windstorms affecting Europe. In addition, a number of clients are now using Impact Forecasting projected loss reporting for European Windstorm and US Hurricane, allowing insurers the possibility to calculate projected losses in advance of an event.