PCS designates hurricane Delta as first Mexico catastrophe event

Property Claim Services (PCS) has designated recent hurricane Delta’s impacts on the Yucatan region as the first catastrophe event under its recently launched PCS Mexico industry loss data aggregation and index reporting services.

PCS teamed up with Asociación Mexicana de Instituciones de Seguros (AMIS) to launch the PCS Mexico service just over a year ago.

PCS Mexico offers full coverage for both natural and man-made loss events across Mexico that cause total industry insured loss estimates of at least MX $300 million (approximately US $15 million).

Hurricane Delta slammed into the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, impacting many of the main tourist locations in the region, as well as Campeche, Quintana Roo and the surrounding area.

The hurricane made landfall with winds of around 110 mph 20 miles from Cancun, having weakened from its one-time Category 4 status prior to impacting Mexico.

Storm surge and wind impacts were still relatively significant, especially in some of the higher-value coastal tourist regions.

Catastrophe risk modelling companies had estimated that Delta will have caused insurance and reinsurance market losses in the low to mid hundreds of millions of US dollars onshore in Mexico.

Tom Johansmeyer, Head of PCS, told us, “Since going live a year ago, PCS has worked closely with AMIS to prepare for our first new catastrophe designation under PCS Mexico. The strong support we have seen from the insurance industry during our shared development of PCS Mexico followed by our ongoing communication and test activities made the first designation a smooth process.

“We will follow our methodology in the coming weeks to help our friends AMIS and the insurance industry in Mexico gather an industrywide view of the event and use the reported data in their catastrophe, risk, and capital management operations.”

PCS went on to designate hurricane Delta for its impacts in the United States as well.

With a similar region of Mexico hit this week by hurricane Zeta too, there is the potential for a second PCS Mexico catastrophe event to be designated as well in the coming weeks.