Catastrophe modeling is a critical part of property underwriting, particularly as values and concentrations of insured buildings increase. But historically, companies have had to rely on proprietary vendor tools or their own development staff to provide the systems for this modeling.

Recently, however, free and publicly available mapping, geo-coding, and satellite imagery systems have put detailed property location information at the fingertips of everyone connected to the Internet–from families planning a coastal getaway to reinsurance risk managers assessing coastal flood exposure. Perhaps the best known of these systems is Google Earth. Among its most powerful features for insurers, open APIs enable companies to incorporate data from a multitude of systems and sources via mashups, rather than relying on vendors to create custom data integrations.

Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty, the international industrial insurance carrier subsidiary of the Allianz Group, had long used a variety of catastrophe modeling software. However, with the advent of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the company realized the need to make modeling more graphical and to manage its book of business more proactively.

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