CatIQ launches to offer catastrophe loss data & indices for Canada

A new venture named Catastrophe Indices and Quantification Inc. (CatIQ) has launched targeting the provision of Canadian catastrophe loss data, indices and analysis to the insurance and reinsurance industries.

CatIQ provides a subscription based service providing analytical and meteorological information on Canadian natural and man-made catastrophes. CatIQ aims to provide insured loss indices, industry-wide loss estimates, Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping and other related information and analysis through the online service.

“It is essential that insurers have access to reliable, detailed and complete catastrophe data in order to better understand, underwrite, manage, price, reserve, monitor, quantify and transfer catastrophe risk,” said Joel Baker, CEO, CatIQ.

CatIQ will no doubt be targeting the catastrophe bond, insurance-linked securities (ILS) and industry loss warranty (ILW) markets, seeking to become a provider of industry loss estimates for use within triggers for risk transfer instruments.

CatIQ has the backing of an advisory committee consisting of some key and senior figures in the Canadian insurance and reinsurance industry. The committee has a mandate to guide the development and roll-out of CatIQ to ensure it provides exactly what the industry requires.

Joel Baker continued; “An overwhelming majority of insurers operating in Canada as well as reinsurance brokers, reinsurers and the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction support the launch of CatIQ and have provided valuable input during our recent cross-country road show, which has helped to shape the methodology and feature set of CatIQ.”

CatIQ is a sister company to MSA Research Inc., a Candian provider of insurance analytics and market-share information which will be leveraged to maximise the precision of CatIQ’s catastrophe loss indices.

“The increasing level of catastrophe activity in Canada requires that insurers, reinsurers, (re)insurance intermediaries and others have access to a suite of dynamic tools that will allow them to get a better handle on the impact that these events can have on their individual operations,” commented Glenn McGillivray, Managing Director, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. “CatIQ will offer such tools and in the coming months and years, we look forward to seeing firsthand the positive effect these will have on the way Canadian property and casualty industry players deal with the challenge of more and larger extreme events.”

CatIQ describes a number of key factors which it believes differentiates its service:

• Industry loss estimation techniques to improve estimate/index reliability, line-of business granularity, territorial foot printing and market-share coverage scoring.
• GIS mapping technology to identify catastrophe footprints, meteorological metrics and other data feeds.
• Market share views to allow primary insurers to easily benchmark themselves against the overall market leveraging MSA’s proprietary Canadian property and casualty (P&C) market share analytics.
• Dispersion analytics to provide subscribers with more than just point estimates.
• Query view to enable users to quickly and easily analyze loss information, filter it, manipulate it and export it to other applications.
• Bulletin view to provide detailed analytical reports describing each catastrophic event combined with detailed industry loss information by line of business.

CatIQ will be placing itself in competition with Property Claims Services (PCS) PCS-Canada offering, which provides catastrophe bulletins, estimates, indices and details of reported industry losses for Canadian catastrophe events already. Choice, however, is no bad thing for insurers and reinsurers looking for access to robust sources of catastrophe loss data for use within their businesses.