Catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide (AIR) announced Wednesday that a large number of third-party suppliers have chosen to provide their data and models through Touchstone.

Those third-party suppliers include Ambiental, ERN, EuroTempest, IHS Inc., KatRisk, Met Office, PERILS, and SSBN.

Touchstone creates an open platform for insurers and reinsurers to manage their exposures and catastrophe risk. This integration will allow users to assess and manage risk across a wide range of perils, including flood, terrorism, earthquake, tropical cyclone, and other perils.

“Touchstone was designed to be an open platform, allowing clients to import third-party hazard layers or run multiple alternative models on a single platform for a more complete view of risk,” said Ming Lee, president and CEO of AIR Worldwide. “Because we have not adopted a ‘usage fee’ or ‘pay-per-click’ pricing model for Touchstone, availability of third-party models and hazard layers will encourage our clients to run more analyses, not fewer, to explore and compare alternative views and truly own their risk,” Lee said in a statement.

“We are very pleased that AIR is enabling integration of our many flood hazard maps through its Touchstone platform,” said Guy Morrow, cofounder of KatRisk. “This will help deliver new sources of data to a much broader audience, which is particularly important for a complex peril such as flood.”

Referring to ERN’s models and hazard data for Mexico and Latin America, which can be run on Touchstone’s platform, Eduardo Reinoso, CEO at ERN, said, “There are many operational benefits to providing models from multiple developers on a single platform, including significantly reduced data preparation and processing time, easier viewing, and comparison of multiple results.”

In addition to continuing discussions with other third-party data and model providers, AIR is also cementing links and enabling closer integration with other major industry organizations, such as the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) and PERILS. AIR was a founding member and key contributor to GEM, which is developing an open-source platform for sharing data, models, and knowledge about seismic risk assessment.

PERILS and AIR allow mutual clients to integrate the PERILS Industry Exposure Database (IED) and event sets generated using this IED.

AIR is a member of the Verisk Insurance Solutions group at Verisk Analytics (Nasdaq:VRSK).

Source: AIR Worldwide