ACE Tempest Reinsurance Ltd. First to Integrate AIR’s Catastrophe Loss Modeling Technology for its Underwriting Software

ACE Tempest Reinsurance Ltd. (ACE Tempest Re) and AIR Worldwide Corporation (AIR) announced the first implementation of an innovative toolset, CATools, which reportedly significantly increases the efficiency of the underwriting and risk management process through the seamless integration of catastrophe modeling with the global reinsurer’s underwriting and risk management systems.

Insurers and reinsurers have reportedly long been seeking a way to improve their workflow efficiency through such integration. ACE Tempest Re is among the first in the industry to achieve this objective with the implementation of AIR’s CATools. ACE Tempest Re’s underwriters are now able to access AIR’s catastrophe loss information directly, without leaving their proprietary Heuron underwriting system and no longer need to exchange significant data volumes with a separate modeling system.

“The risk assessment provided by the catastrophe models is a vital element of Tempest’s catastrophe management process. The ability to run our analyses from Heuron directly against our exposure databases will ultimately have a significant impact on the speed with which we can service our clients,” said Sean Ringsted, chief risk officer at ACE Global Reinsurance. “This pioneering integration of CATools into our Heuron platform will save us significant time and resources and further improve our ability to meet our clients’ needs. It is a great testament both to the hard work of the ACE Tempest Re Heuron team and AIR’s willingness to understand and provide a product that met our business and technology objectives.”

CATools is an application programming interface (API) offering insurers two options based on industry standard protocols. The first is a component-based API that is compatible with any Windows-based underwriting system. Another option is a Web Services API that connects with any underwriting platform via the Internet or an Intranet.

The component system gives users access to AIR’s full suite of catastrophe modeling capabilities including geocoding, hazard analysis, full probabilistic loss analysis, and its CLASIC/2 database to store exposure information and analysis results.

“AIR’s mission is to develop solutions that fit the evolving needs of our clients. We believe the future for catastrophe modeling infrastructure is the full integration with insurers’ underwriting and policy ratings systems. CATools enables insurers to spend less time on data processing and more time on what matters, namely, analysis of the results and decision-making,” said Vivek Basrur, executive vice president at AIR.

AIR will continue to offer insurers and reinsurers access to its catastrophe modeling technology through intuitively designed and easy to use interactive applications, including CATStation, CLASIC/2, CATRADER and AIRProfiler. Current users of these applications have the option to integrate AIR technology with their own underwriting solutions using CATools.