Content from Karen Clark
Karen Clark, the president of Karen Clark & Company, is internationally recognized as the founder of the first catastrophe modeling firm and as the expert in the field of catastrophe risk assessment and management. Reach Karen at info90410@karenclarkandco.com.
Managing a Pandemic: Are There Lessons From Catastrophe Modeling?
COVID-19 isn't the first and won't be the last pandemic to threaten the well-being of the global population, but it will likely turn out to be the worst in the last 100 years. It would be hard to ...
How Insurers and Reinsurers Can Proactively Manage Weather-Related Claims
Insurers handle and pay out millions of weather-related claims each year on homes, businesses, and automobiles. The bulk of these claims result from wind and hail damage caused by severe convective ...
Building Smarter Cat Models: Why They Need an Upgrade
Not too long ago, a phone was just a phone. Along with a phone, you needed an alarm clock, a calculator, a CD player, a camera and many other electronic devices. Today, all of those capabilities and ...
What Harvey and Irma Say About the Accuracy of Catastrophe Models
Four hours after Hurricane Andrew made landfall near Homestead, Fla. in 1992, catastrophe modeler AIR issued a statement that the insured losses could exceed $13 billion in Florida. Actual losses ...
Innovation in Risk Modeling: How to Build a Plane While Flying It
When my partner, Vivek Basrur, and I started Karen Clark & Co. (KCC), we had no intention of building catastrophe models again. In fact, that's the one thing we said we wouldn't do. But after a ...
How New Rating Agency Formulas Could Impact Reinsurance and the ILS Market
U.S. hurricane is the peril most likely to cause the largest insured catastrophe losses and therefore financial impairment for insurance companies that are not adequately prepared. To date, rating ...
Big Data Analytics: Mining Your Catastrophe Claims Data for Competitive Advantage
Big data for catastrophes sounds like an oxymoron. It's precisely because of the lack of historical data that actuaries have left catastrophe modeling and loss estimation to external third parties ...
Why Convective Storm Models Are Unreliable
In the United States, severe convective storms (SCS)—also known as severe thunderstorms, which can include tornadoes, hail and strong localized wind gusts—cause average annual insured losses of ...