Karen Clark News
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 ...
Earthquakes for CEOs: Understanding the Most Recent USGS Report
Every six years the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) produces an updated set of seismic hazard maps for the United States. These National Hazard Maps show the estimated probabilities of different levels ...
Karen Clark & Co. Releases New U.S. Earthquake Reference Model
Karen Clark & Co. (KCC) released a new U.S. Earthquake Reference Model as part of its RiskInsight open loss modeling platform. The model is based on the latest 2014 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) ...
Why Build Your Own Cat Model?
Insurers are using the new open loss modeling platforms to build their own catastrophe models for three main reasons: clarity, control and cost. Catastrophe models have become extremely important ...
How to Build Your Own Catastrophe Model
Given the complexity of catastrophe models, at first it might seem impossible for you to build your own. This was certainly the case 10-20 years ago. But technology has changed since the ...