The Risks of Hazard

I've been discussing the merits of risk scoring quite a bit recently, first explaining the 4 major benefits and then taking a closer look at how it works. But since pictures are worth a thousand words, I've put together a visual presentation that shows the value of risk scoring, specifically in InsitePro. 

In my third blog post comparing InsitePro™ to RiskMeter Online™ (read the first two posts here and here), I’ll be discussing breadth of coverage. A key advantage of InsitePro is the fact that it offers location-based risk information for any address, anywhere in the world.

Insurance is the epitome of an international business, with insurers and brokers frequently based across borders. Their customers, too, are frequently international companies based all over the globe. Therefore relying on risk software that can only be used to understand risk in one specific country has clear drawbacks in this industry.

Other than the population of number-crunchers concentrated in lower Manhattan, (a.k.a the stock market), there is no other industry more enamored with — and dependent upon — huge amounts of data than insurance. To run their day-to-day businesses, insurers of all kinds depend upon everything from 100-year-old archives of policies and claims, to predictive analytics producing data for events that haven’t actually happened. 

Specifically, property insurers (as well as brokers and reinsurers) depend on natural catastrophe models, maps, building plans, and industrial machinery profiles, along with their own claims and policy data. The reason everyone needs to use so many datasets is that no single dataset is satisfactory, let alone comprehensive, for predicting the future (which is what every insurer is essentially trying to do every hour of every day).

This blog is the first of five that will explore how InsitePro™, Intermap’s location-based risk software, compares to RiskMeter Online™, the market leading solution from Core Logic. The two solutions serve a very similar purpose, but they do so very differently. Investigating those differences should prove to be interesting.

There are a variety of ways to get location-based risk assessment information, including maps, tables, standard reports, or an interactive combination of the above. There is no “best” way to deliver this type of information, because different users will have different needs. Finding the right solution should be the priority for everyone who uses risk information.

This post proudly features guest writer Michael Wollersheim, geomatics scientist and lead engineer at Intermap Technologies.

In the preceding three years, I have had the great pleasure of attending some of the foremost conferences on wildland fire hosted by organizations like the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and the International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF). I have also been fortunate to have the opportunity to visit the world-class Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory at the Rocky Mountain Research Station to speak with some of the leading researchers in this complex field of science, economics, and politics.