Catastrophe risk in focus: a single view of risk

Product strategist Simon Fagg addressed the Cat Risk Summit, demonstrating AdvantageGo’s single-pane-of-glass concept to provide underwriters with the best lens for cat risks.

Property catastrophe underwriters and their exposure teams are used to being at the sharp end of the insurance and reinsurance markets. The hard market for natural catastrophe risks means that well-rated underwriting opportunities have become plentiful in 2023, while risk appetite, capacity and triage are constraining factors for many cat risk carriers.

In this situation, the right technology platform – harnessing data and analytics to provide timely intelligence – is going to be crucial to gaining an edge in cat risk selection and exposure analysis.

Innovation within these areas is the main focus of the Cat Risk Management and Modelling Summit. A few hundred exposure analysts, brokers, underwriters and service providers attend the London event to learn how emerging science, new technology and artificial intelligence (AI) tools can deliver a competitive edge. We call this ‘the pursuit of real-time intelligence’ and is point 3 in our company product vision and mission.

Most of the drivers for change within the cat risk business, particularly in recent years, focus on what is now a known business critical strategic initiative across the entire insurance and reinsurance marketplace: interoperability and operational efficiency garnered from a transition to a digital ecosystem. This is point 2 in our company 3-point plan – ‘introduce functionalities that assist in making better informed decisions and doing so with operational and commercial efficiency’. Naturally, other associated industry buzz words reverberate out across our customers as one would expect as stoic realisation of what a digital ecosystem brings to our industry.

From AdvantageGo’s perspective, we attend these industry events, along with other initiatives with the intention of listening to what clients and prospects need, ensuring our vision, our strategy, and our aspirations evolve or remain aligned with the needs of the Commercial Underwriter. Underwriting excellence is the aim.

As a speaker, the event also provides a useful opportunity to build awareness about how our platform – and Underwriting Workbench in particular – and how it can be used to provide a single view of cat risk, something that many in the audience are seeking in their journey towards underwriting excellence.

What we see is that distilling data from multiple sources and turning it into timely insights has made catastrophe risk underwriting a complex challenge. As an example, attaining an up-to-date view-of-risk that can support a pre-bind assessment on “so-called” secondary perils such as Inland flood, tornadoes or hailstorms may encompass many sources of data; the submission, external hazard providers, geospatial mapping/geocoding providers and downstream data validation and cleansing.

For many years underwriters have been reactive in the perspectives, relying on historical loss accounts, incomplete data, with limited perspectives on offer from which to evaluate the risk., This historical or rear-view approach to determining future events problematic and ever-so more damaging as we continue to move towards greater global complexity and uncertainty.

There are plenty of cliches that illustrate the situation facing over-worked underwriters reliant on manual processes and just a few legacy vendor systems – seeing the woods through the trees, finding needles in haystacks – you get the picture.

Conversely, and in the present opportunity-rich pricing environment, fast-moving underwriters can gain a competitive advantage through both; a quick rate to quote pre-bind decision, and decisive and optimised rating (aligning to risk appetite) prior to their peers.

A single platform, like ours, should act like a pane of glass to provide a consolidated view of risk (with multiple adjustable perspectives), driving the best risk selection and post-bind Event Response analysis. At AdvantageGo, we strive to optimise the Underwriter by focusing them onto value-added tasks only, utilising AI to streamline unstructured submission ingestion and provide decision-support guided by trusted-vendor sources to enhance straight-through processing and accept, reject and defer submissions on that basis.

To meet this brief, we’ve been busy transitioning our products into a singular experience, connecting the components through Infrastructure as a service and making data a servant-master over our application. We call this our central data environment:- A global scale, corporate-grade infrastructure play designed with empowering decision-making processes to be more efficient and faster, providing an optimized single-source of information to the Underwriter and supporting teams which enables improvement for Carriers seeking to grow whilst mitigating risk.

You can book a demo with our team to learn more about our “single-pane-of-glass” approach and how it can help you build a better informed view-of-risk.