The Risks of Hazard

I have been watching some of the videos published by AM Best from the RIMS annual convention in New Orleans last month. The city hosted the event to mark 10 years since Katrina and Rita devastated the region. I couldn’t make it to the show, so I wanted to catch up on some of the current thought leadership surrounding natural catastrophe risk. 

One of the regular topics of this blog has been the importance of having the best data for the job when trying to understand risk, as well as understanding what can and can’t be done with the data at hand. Earlier this month (March 2015), there was a fantastic case study showcasing this principle in action in the U.K. flood insurance market.

Over the past few weeks, I published a series of blog posts comparing  InsitePro™ to RiskMeter Online™. Readers might have been wondering why anything but RiskMeter is needed for flood risk assessments in the United States, where FEMA ratings dictate flood insurance rates. The reason is that times are changing, and more and more carriers are moving into private (i.e., not backed by the NFIP) flood coverage, where FEMA ratings — and thus RiskMeter — are no longer adequate.

Flood poses risk to property and productivity on every continent, and most developed countries have flood insurance available to mitigate that risk. However, everywhere you go, the flood insurance market is different.