Florida, USA, 21 May 2007: Pitney Bowes MapInfo introduced the Risk Data Suite for risk management. Based on historical information on weather and natural disaster-related occurrences, the Risk Data Suite will act as a source of data that enables property and casualty underwriters, actuaries and risk managers to make better decisions in providing insurances for people being affected by natural disasters.
The Pitney Bowes MapInfo comprehensive weather peril and natural disaster database consists of four individual bundles and aggregate exposure grids.
The four bundles include:
Earthquake Bundle: It provides a historical record of earthquakes since 1492, enabling insurers to calculate rates based on proximity to fault lines. Data includes information on fault lines, fault zones, earthquake epicenters and aggregate exposure grids.
Weather Bundle: It includes geographic data on occurrences of hurricanes, hail storms, tornados, windstorms and lightning based on the location, movement and exposure of a single event, enabling users to more realistically model portfolio disaster scenarios or to evaluate individual policy exposures.
Windpool Bundle: It contains three layers of data feature maps of Florida wind speed and wind-borne debris regions, as well as State Windpool Eligibility Zones to help insurers make property, wind or hail insurance available to applicants.
Mass Movement Bundle: The initial release of Risk Data Suite features maps of volcanic hazard zones for Hawaii, dividing it into zones based on the probability of coverage by lava flows.
“While weather-related disasters can happen at any time and are unavoidable, it is essential that insurance companies are armed with a complete and accurate picture of potential weather perils based on past occurrences. This is exactly what the Risk Data Suite delivers,” said Craig Bedell, director of Global Insurance for Pitney Bowes MapInfo. “This data set, coupled with our location intelligence applications, provides a powerful analytic tool for critical insurance decisions in underwriting, portfolio risk, realistic disaster scenario analysis, and claims planning and preparedness.”
For more information visit www.pb.com
