PERILS eyes expansion into Asia-Pacific

PERILS, the European aggregator of catastrophe insurance data, is preparing to set out a new suite of products and take its offering into new markets, including Asia.

PERILS’ initial scope was to offer market-wide exposure and loss data for European windstorm, together with an industry loss index service to provide the basis for triggers for industry loss-based risk transfer transactions.

Eduard Held, head of products at PERILS, said it has now entered a new development phase which sees the firm broadening the scope of its activities beyond that of purely an aggregator of European insured catastrophe loss data.

“Our expansion plans cover both our range of products and also our geographical reach. We have often been asked by our business partners to include territories outside Europe, such as the US.

“However, our focus is on the potential to expand our capabilities into the Asia-Pacific region and we hope that over the next three years, we should be able to leverage our credibility in the market to include some of the important insurance markets in the region in our coverage,” he said.

Held added that the cat modelling arena has become a much more competitive environment in recent years, with the emergence of a range of new models and providers—both commercial and in-house—and this was something to be welcomed.

“This is a very positive development for the insurance industry. Accompanied by advances in technology, it has also sparked the introduction of platforms giving the model user the flexibility to combine different model components resulting in a higher degree of transparency and allowing a proprietary view of cat risk.”

Held added that in addition to probabilistic and often theoretical approaches, real data and actual scenario losses are crucial to providing a comprehensive understanding of cat risk.

“All these developments have helped improve our ability to quantify cat risk, increasing both the acceptance and therefore the tradability of the risk, and further expanding the community of potential protection sellers. The increased supply of capacity that this creates in turn should continue to put pressure on pricing.”