PERILS sees boost from CRESTA
PERILS, the independent company that provides data to the insurance industry, has taken over the management of the CRESTA secretariat, a global data standard applied to the exchange of insurance information—in a move that will boost the company’s own offering, PERILS CEO Luzi Hitz, told Monte Carlo Today.
The secretariat was previously managed on a rotational basis by Munich Re and Swiss Re. The organisation was established by the insurance and reinsurance industry in 1977 as an independent body to enable the standardised management of natural perils insurance data by establishing and maintaining a uniform global system of risk accumulation zones which could be used for modelling and risk transfer purposes.
The main tasks of the CRESTA secretariat include the maintenance of the CRESTA zoning standards as well as interacting directly with its users.
“You can walk around here and talk to an Indian, French or Chinese insurance company and they will all know the CRESTA zones,” Hitz said. “It’s firmly established. It gives us a global reach.”
He explained that the benefit of managing the organisation is the synergies between them: CRESTA is global, while PERILS’ core activity of collecting industry losses after a big event and producing market loss data has potential to expand.
PERILS’ Industry Loss Index Service can be used to formulate triggers in insurance risk transactions such as industry loss warranty contracts (ILW) or insurance-linked securities (ILS). It covers 16 countries including Australia, Austria, France, Germany and the UK.
“We add new countries regularly with our industry and loss exposure database,” Hitz said.
PERILS now wants to engage with the insurance and reinsurance industry, brokers and modellers to discuss how the CRESTA standards can be improved further.
“Our task is to keep it relevant and make the standard more suited to today’s digital world. That’s where we can really bring efficiency to the process,” Hitz said.
Data exchange in risk transfer will become much more efficient if all market participants use the same standards in digital databases, he explained.
