New Event Analytics tool set to drive better risk management decisions

When catastrophe strikes, the clock starts ticking, and for re/insurers, every hour counts. That urgency has driven Aon to rethink dealing with live catastrophe situations and renewal planning.

Key points:
New platform streamlines catastrophe insights
High-resolution data at building level
Historic catalogue supports portfolio recast

Dan Hartung, global head of Event Response at Aon, told APCIA Today the company had now unified its approach. “With the launch of Event Analytics, we are bringing all of our solutions together under a unified umbrella,” he explained. 

Launched in September, Aon’s Event Analytics platform is designed to cut through the noise of disjointed data and give insurers a single, streamlined view of exposures, losses and market context as an event unfolds.

In the past, Hartung admitted, the process of helping clients during a live event involved “a number of disparate solutions and communication streams with multiple portals and various forms of disseminating information from email to phone calls to webinars.” Now all that has been combined into a central solution. 

Automated notifications – customised by clients – deliver detailed hazard footprints, loss estimates and market share analysis in a single executive-style report. 

“Instead of offering just specific insights, Event Analytics is a holistic platform that helps clients to implement Aon’s data and analytics to drive better decision making,” Hartung stated.

The platform combines three core capabilities; first, a global data set with enhanced mapping and visualisation, drawing on vendor partnerships to provide high-resolution footprints for perils such as flood, down to the “block and building level”. 

“Event Analytics is a holistic platform that helps clients to implement Aon’s data and analytics to drive better decision making.”

Second, integration of client exposure, loss and market insights into customised reports; and third, an expanding historical event catalogue which already includes more than 40 of the largest insured-loss tropical cyclones worldwide. Aon’s goal is to build a library that includes the top 100 costliest global events across perils and much more.

The catalogue allows insurers to recast past events on their current portfolios to see how changes in underwriting and portfolio strategy would alter the outcome today. Hartung noted: “It helps clients to quantify underwriting and portfolio management impacts by recasting a historical event as if it occurred today.”

Coverage spans tropical cyclones and flood globally, as well as US severe convective storm, with earthquake, wildfire, and European windstorm also on the agenda. “The roadmap covers all significantly insured perils globally, with a prioritisation that reflects the needs of our clients,” Hartung said.

Real-time functionality is equally critical: if a major US storm were forming today, the system would begin delivering reports every six hours, starting as early as 5 days before landfall. Hartung explained that each update would include exposure by wind severity, multi-model loss estimates and an industry loss share view. “For an event such as a US hurricane, our clients would receive these customized, detailed reports that bring all of these insights together, tracked every six hours as the event unfolds,” Hartung explained.

This immediacy not only supports insurers’ internal decision-making but also strengthens dialogue with their reinsurers. “It helps them communicate this information to their reinsurance partners, to make sure that they have the capital they need to support the business and also keep trading partners up to speed throughout the renewal process,” Hartung emphasised. Historical or ongoing loss activity, he added, can have a materially affect treaty coverage and terms.

Looking ahead, he sees rapid adoption through Q4 as insurers apply the system’s “what if” analytics both to peak and frequency perils. That includes challenging exposures such as large hail or derechos, where clients have historically struggled to quantify risk. 

“There will be a significant advantage on the frequency peril side because we haven’t historically had the ability to quickly perform comparison analytics on past events at a detailed hazard severity level,” Hartung observed.

For him, the greatest value lies in turning data into decisions. Clients no longer just receive information: they get context, benchmarking and tools to model how future losses could reshape their portfolios. 

“We’re always engaging and listening to clients for input that directly informs our development priorities,” Hartung concluded. “As we look forward to 2026 and beyond, the solution will be enhanced by client feedback and not by our own guesstimate of what our clients are looking for.”

By embedding live analytics, historic recast capabilities and client-driven customisation, Aon aims to make catastrophe response more than a reaction, and instead a foundation for smarter capital, risk transfer and renewal discussions year-round.

Dan Hartung is global head of event response at Aon. He can be contacted at: daniel.hartung@aon.com

For more news from the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) click here.

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