To this end, we know we have to provide more than “black boxes” with programmed output. We provide rating plans that stand on their own, but we are seeking to add analytical capabilities that allow our customers to refine a product for their own purposes.

A good example is the AAIS Homeowners' By-Peril Rating Plan. This initiative provides a comprehensive plan for rating Homeowners' policies for 10 different perils and also the ability to modify loss costs and rate relativities for individual perils. This capability allows carriers to identify key factors that contribute to losses and implement targeted credits, debits, deductibles and other pricing actions to write more business at acceptable loss ratios.

AAIS' orientation toward providing “solutions plus tools” allows for better segmentation of risk pricing and a wide range of policy options. This adds up to more opportunities for producers to write business they might otherwise have avoided.

What type of AAIS-provided data would producers and carriers find most useful?

AAIS is engaged on behalf of its members in identifying sources of data—public and private—that provide information on risk characteristics that, in turn, can become underwriting and rating variables. In addition, we will be enhancing the ability of our member companies to access data, submit queries and prepare customized reports on their experience.

These efforts are in response to a desire on the part of carriers and agents for information that precisely but succinctly identifies patterns of loss, leading to more business that is adequately but competitively priced.

In your prior position, as chief information officer at ICAT Holdings, which specializes in Property insurance for property owners in hurricane- and earthquake-exposed regions, your team developed Web-based applications for providing customized Catastrophe insurance products and for supporting real-time data exchanges between diverse systems. How will this experience inform your work at AAIS?

Successful organizations must be able to exchange data seamlessly, using the most current technology and open standards. They also need to tap into that data with analytics to discover new opportunities for products and services. Today, producers and carriers are not completely tapping all the information available in their current data. A lot of work needs to be done to improve how data is exchanged and the way it is made available for analysis.

One of our goals at AAIS is to help our members, particularly the carriers that report statistical data to us, make better use of their proprietary data and supplement it with data from other sources.