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April 22, 2005
Improvements in Commercial Property Terrorism Modeling Reported at CAS Seminar On Ratemaking
NEW ORLEANS, LA, March 21 - Recent improvements in computer modeling to estimate commercial property terrorism exposures are helping insurers better price coverage, experts on the subject told attendees at the Casualty Actuarial Society's annual Seminar on Ratemaking.
The session covered the two main types of potential future terrorist attacks: conventional and chemical/biological/radiological/nuclear (CBRN), as well as a summary of the Federal Backstop Program - the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA).
"In the area of catastrophe modeling, Hurricane Andrew was a real wake-up call to the insurance industry in terms of managing accumulations of property exposures, and similarly 9/11 was also a wake-up call in terms of managing accumulations of exposure across multiple lines of business," David Lalonde, senior vice president, AIR Worldwide Corporation (AIR), told the actuaries. And now insurers and reinsurers are taking a much broader view of catastrophe risk in addressing the financial exposure of possible future attacks, he added.
AIR is a risk modeling company that helps clients manage the financial impact of natural and man-made catastrophes. The ongoing improvement in the level of detailed data being collected in terrorism modeling shows the importance of examining exposures, the types of weapons terrorists might use, and their potential targets, Lalonde explained.
Among a number of things, terrorism modeling helps insurers get a more complete picture of an extreme event that could adversely affect their financial results, establishes underwriting guidelines to offer profitable coverage while controlling risk, and provides a better understanding of reinsurance needs.
Lalonde said the key questions answered by terrorism models are: What are the potential targets? What is the method of attack and what types of weapons could be used? And what are the effects of the weapons?
"In terrorism modeling you're looking at relationships between a certain size bomb and the amount of damage being done to a building and the surrounding area," he said. "It's led to an evolution of the models beyond physical damage, including injuries, loss of life, disability, and contamination which includes cleanup costs," he noted.
Lalonde said the types of attacks being modeled by AIR are conventional ones, such as bombs and airplane crashes, and CBRN.
The conventional attack damage estimates consider multiple effects on the target and surrounding buildings and CBRN events are modeled using the Department of Defense standard model, which includes the full spectrum of chemical/biological/nuclear weapons and can accurately predict the effects of the release of hazardous materials.
"We also have assembled a team of experts to identify terrorist groups' objectives, capabilities and resources, and the history of their attacks," he said. "And based on expert opinions, we can estimate the potential frequency and severity of attacks by these groups." The resulting threat index can then be spread across individual landmarks in a geographic area.
Results from catastrophe models can show the annual aggregate losses and the annual occurrence losses on an industry-wide and company specific basis. And the models provide structural flexibility for geographic area, line of business and construction type for both foreign and domestic terrorist attacks using conventional or CBRN weapons, the AIR official said.
ISO, a provider of products and services that help measure, manage, and reduce risk, used the AIR terrorism exposure model to develop new filings on behalf of insurers. ISO Assistant Vice President George Burger took actuaries at the meeting through his organization's process for commercial terrorism pricing.
"After TRIA went into effect in 2002, we used AIR's terrorism model to file loss costs for terrorism coverage," Burger said. "Last year, we updated the original loss costs and made new filings based on the current threat assessment."
For terrorism pricing, ISO has focused mainly on Commercial Property coverage, but has gone beyond that to include General Liability, Commercial Auto and Business owners - a combination of property and liability, he said.
ISO made insurance-related adjustments to AIR loss costs including factors to account for insurance-to-value, the federal backstop factors (to reflect TRIA), and loss adjustment expenses, he said.
ISO's 2004 review dealt with changes to both CBRN and conventional-type attack loss estimates. This had a larger impact in many cities and counties within large metropolitan areas, mainly due to the larger footprint of CBRN events.
Since the last quarter of 2004, ISO has filed projected loss costs and received approval in 45 jurisdictions to date. In most of the states the filings have been for increases because many counties and cities have moved from the lowest tier into the middle tier of terrorism risk.
Despite the strides made in modeling to estimate terrorism exposures, the presenters acknowledged that it is still an emerging field trying to address a problem that is inherently uncertain.
The Casualty Actuarial Society is an organization dedicated to the advancement of the body of knowledge of actuarial science applied to property, casualty and similar risk exposures. The primary goal of the Casualty Actuarial Society is to provide education and research to help its members become leading experts in the evaluation of hazard risk and the integration of hazard risk with strategic, financial and operational risk.
Posted by Tom Troceen