Business & Money | Tuesday 12 July, 2016 5:23 pm |

Impact Forecasting, Aon Benfield’s catastrophe model development team, has launched ELEMENTS 10 – its complete catastrophe modelling platform to enhance strategic business decisions. Aon Benfield is the global reinsurance intermediary and capital advisor of Aon plc (NYSE:AON).

As catastrophe modellers play an increasingly strategic role in exploring emerging markets and shaping product opportunities, the ELEMENTS platform enables them to obtain new insights and manage the process from start to finish. This ranges from the ability to use an insurer’s own loss data to customise various model components to extensive reporting capabilities to communicate results to senior management and regulators.

As such ELEMENTS 10 gives modellers the flexibility to import various formats, run any implemented third party model, actively manage accumulations, quantify uncertainty and even provide insights for underwriting colleagues – all on one platform.

A key aspect of the enhanced platform is the increased ease of running any third party or insurers’ own model. For example, modellers can now access flood models from Ambiental, JBA and SSBN or UCL’s tsunami model.  Equally, Impact Forecasting models are also being used on other platforms – including ImageCat, Spatial Key and Opta, with the latter incorporating Canada flood data into its iClarify™ tool to improve underwriting.

Adam Podlaha, Global Head of Impact Forecasting, commented: “We are taking collaboration to the next level and empowering catastrophe modellers to have complete control over the process from start to finish – in addition to providing a wide model selection. Having pioneered transparent modelling back in 1995, we are continuously building upon this to bring additional possibilities to modellers. Now Impact Forecasting has gone a step further with the evolution of traditional modelling for reinsurance to underwriting, new product development and automated accumulation control.”

Stefan Hiemer, Natural Hazard Analyst at Qatar Re, added: “ELEMENTS enables us to have full control of model customisation, which gives us the opportunity to adjust the models in regions where we have additional insights and new information through access to the markets.”

Additional features of ELEMENTS 10 include:

• New Impact Forecasting models including a suite of new and updated flood models for US, Canada, Malaysia and Poland. The US river flood model has been expanded for pluvial risk in addition to updating the fluvial and the storm surge risks. In addition, the coverage of the European windstorm model has extended to Austria and the Scandinavian countries and to include forestry.
• Taking it one step further by enabling catastrophe modellers to run any model Impact Forecasting or third party, in the Impact Forecasting or in the Oasis hazard and vulnerability files format. Additional enhancements to the way flood models are implemented using the Oasis model files have led to a significant reduction in space requirements
• ELEMENTS Explorer has expanded to provide basic model and uncertainty documentation as well as direct access to most frequently used queries with the overall goal to aid the needs of internal and regulatory reporting. In addition most components of ELEMENTS Explorer have been now included in the main ELEMENTS Client software making the access to the tools more streamlined
• New insights for accumulation control and per policy calculation to support underwriting
• Ability to run ELEMENTS in-house or on the cloud
• Up to 40% improved performance through Dynamic Core allocation – plus an improved graphical user interface