11 October 2016 Insurance

Cat modelling to play critical role in expanding market

The main challenge AIR Worldwide sees in Asia with respect to catastrophe risk management and modelling is a lack of quality exposure data.

This is accompanied by a lack of understanding as to how catastrophe models can be leveraged by various departments of an insurance company, said Ashish Jain, vice president and managing director, AIR Worldwide.

“To help meet these challenges our main objective over the last few years has been to educate the market on the importance of data quality and use of catastrophe models to better understand and manage catastrophe risk,” he said.

“These conversations are benefiting the entire market as we are seeing more companies adopting catastrophe models as part of their overall risk management strategy.”

Asia is a diverse market and each region of the market is different with respect to the risks they are exposed to, maturity of the insurance sector, and understanding and management of risk management tools such as catastrophe models, he added.

“Insurance markets including Japan, Australia and New Zealand have matured, while China and India are evolving rapidly, and more education needs to be done in fast-growing South East Asian markets like Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines which have a great deal of exposure to catastrophe risk.”

The response from the Asian market in the last couple of years has been encouraging, Jain said. “There is genuine feedback from insurers to have a more in-depth understanding of catastrophe modelling and how models can be used, how other companies are using models in more developed markets, as well as how the use of models can provide them with an advantage in the competitive market.”

The key needs from insurers include a better understanding of their exposure accumulation; how they can improve their underwriting and risk-awareness using models; and last but not least, a better understanding of flood risk in this part of the world.

“AIR is working towards bringing more solutions for flood risk in this evolving market,” said Jain.

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