Praedicat, a liability catastrophe modeling company, released its new liability insurance risk modeling platform and says it has secured Swiss Re as its first licensee.

The new platform, known as Oortfolio, is designed to offer emerging risk underwriting and aggregation risk management capabilities for liability insurance and reinsurance.

Chief Executive Officer Robert Reville explains that Oortfolio is designed to handle liability insurance modeling a much different way.

“Oortfolio moves away from the backward-looking paradigm of using historical claims data to understand risk, and brings together a full complement of modern data, technology and modeling to create forward-looking liability insurance operations,” Reville said in prepared remarks.

Andrea Scascighini, head of Casualty Accumulation Solutions at Swiss Re, said that liability insurance covers many industries, including ones that develop new technologies and products that haven’t yet produced claims issues. With that in mind, he said liability-specific modeling as provided by Praedicat is timely.

“Managing these risks requires a new kind of data and modeling – forward-looking modeling – which Swiss Re is bringing to the market both through its own models and through partnerships with independent modelers like Praedicat,” Scascighini said in prepared remarks included in the Praedicat product announcement.

Praedicat’s technology, along with its scientific team, develop risk analytics models built on metadata developed through text-based data mining of peer-reviewed science. The company said it uses the model it develops and data collected on the business activities of specific companies and all industries to estimate their exposure to litigation. Oortfolio’s risk information helps to facilitate measuring the total risk in an insurance company’s portfolio, plus the risk in the underlying companies and industries, according to the company.

Praedicat launched in March 2012, out of a research and development initiative between The RAND Corporation, a non-profit research organization, and Risk Management Solutions (RMS). Both companies are Praedicat investors, and RMS CEO Hemant Shah is a Praedicat board member.

In February 2014, Praedicat debuted its flagship software product, CoMeta, a cloud-based casualty modeling system that delivers commercially-relevant analytics for underwriting and capital management to property/casualty insurers.

Source: Praedicat