LONDON (23 May 2016) – Impact Forecasting, Aon Benfield’s catastrophe model development team, has launched a new version of its catastrophe model to enhance understanding the financial impact of floods in Poland. Aon Benfield is the global reinsurance intermediary and capital advisor of Aon plc (NYSE:AON).

Flood caused over two-thirds of insured losses from natural catastrophes in Poland between 1997 and 2014, exceeding EUR700m. This frequent and costly flooding in recent decades, together with increasing insurance penetration and a need for a more sophisticated accumulation control triggered the most significant update of Impact Forecasting’s probabilistic flood model for Poland since 2004.

The model provides guidelines for rate calculation and risk zoning, is an effective tool for accumulation management and helps drive decisions on reinsurance purchase – all Solvency II regulatory requirements. In addition, the model can be easily customised to reflect an insurer’s individual claims history and can quickly respond to provide real-time loss estimates during a current flood event.

Key innovation behind the model includes:

• Locally sourced hydrological data for over 200 stations combined within a 2D flood model to identify areas susceptible to flooding
• More than 60,000 km of rivers, quadrupling the length of currently modelled rivers
• More than 9,000km of levees, characterised by the location and height
• 120,000 probabilistic events designed to represent flooding patterns during different seasons of the year
• 16,500 industrial estates used to localize industrial assets
• 1997 and 2010 events included to calculate the as-if loss estimates for today’s portfolios

Martin Salaj, model developer at Aon Benfield’s Impact Forecasting team, commented: “The next generation of the flood model for Poland benefits from the ability of the Impact Forecasting team to couple the increased availability of detailed data and advances in hydraulic modelling on a country wide level. The two year development resulted into a tool that enables our clients to achieve effective flood loss evaluation, optimise their underwriting processes and perform real time accumulation monitoring.”

Petra von Seydlitz, head of Aon Benfield’s Poland team, added: “Polish insurers can now access a state-of-the-art model which gives them the power to move beyond pure portfolio analysis. It reinforces Aon Benfield’s commitment to the Polish market.”

ENDS

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