For Immediate Release:
Gen Re Selects AIR's Touchstone Platform
BOSTON, March 16, 2015 - Catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide (AIR) today announced that General Reinsurance Corporation (Gen Re), a global provider of reinsurance solutions to the property/casualty insurance industry, has adopted AIR's Touchstone® platform along with the complete suite of AIR's global catastrophe models. In addition to leveraging Touchstone's detailed loss modeling capability, Gen Re has licensed the platform's Hazard Analytics, Geospatial Analytics, and Data Quality Analytics modules. AIR is a Verisk Analytics (Nasdaq:VRSK) business.
Gen Re is deploying Touchstone across its global insurance and reinsurance operations, including the Lloyd's syndicate Faraday, Gen Re Cologne, Gen Re North America, Gen Re Fac, and General Star. Touchstone will be integrated within Gen Re to support a broad range of risk management needs, from General Star's underwriting of excess and surplus (E&S) business through Gen Re's enterprisewide roll-up and reporting functions.
"We're using Touchstone to gain insight into our individual treaty portfolios within Gen Re and to better understand the risk to these exposures," said Tony Sammur, president and CEO of Gen Re Intermediaries and Gen Re's chief catastrophe modeler. "We did an extensive review of Touchstone and were impressed with the functionality currently available and AIR's road map for the future. We're already taking advantage of this robust platform to help us better understand and evaluate even the most complex exposure to risks for our corporation."
In January 2013, AIR released Touchstone, which is rapidly being deployed throughout the industry and creating new opportunities for catastrophe risk management. Later this year, AIR will be releasing Touchstone 3.0, which will offer comparative analytics that allow companies to compare current portfolio losses with those from previous periods or compare loss results from an updated model with those from the previous release. Also coming in the next release is access to detailed hazard data by stochastic event to give users even more insight into the drivers of loss. Touchstone 3.0 will also provide expanded loss modification capabilities to allow companies to develop their own view of risk.
"Touchstone offers a suite of tools to help companies like Gen Re truly understand and own the risk by providing the flexibility, transparency, and performance needed in today's risk management landscape," said Rob Newbold, senior vice president at AIR Worldwide. "Touchstone has an open platform architecture, which means companies can seamlessly integrate third-party data and models to manage their nonmodeled risk or even test alternative views for perils and regions where an AIR model already exists."
About General Reinsurance
Gen Re, a Berkshire Hathaway Company, is one of the leading Property/Casualty and Life/Health reinsurers in the world, with a network of more than 40 branch and subsidiary offices in key reinsurance markets.
About AIR Worldwide
AIR Worldwide (AIR) is the scientific leader and most respected provider of risk modeling software and consulting services. AIR founded the catastrophe modeling industry in 1987 and today models the risk from natural catastrophes and terrorism in more than 90 countries. More than 400 insurance, reinsurance, financial, corporate, and government clients rely on AIR software and services for catastrophe risk management, insurance-linked securities, detailed site-specific wind and seismic engineering analyses, and agricultural risk management. AIR, a Verisk Analytics (Nasdaq:VRSK) business, is headquartered in Boston with additional offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, please visit www.air-worldwide.com.
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For more information, contact:
Kevin Long
AIR Worldwide
+1-617-267-6645
klong@air-worldwide.com