Benzinga | Jul 13, 2020 07:03AM EDT

CNA Transitions To Verisk's AIR Worldwide As Its Primary Catastrophe Risk Management Platform



Boston, July 13, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide announced that CNA has transitioned to AIR's Touchstone solution as its primary catastrophe risk modeling platform. AIR Worldwide is a Verisk (NASDAQ:VRSK) business.

"We are excited to leverage AIR's powerful catastrophe modeling solution to support our multiple lines of business during the underwriting process," said Tom Stone, vice president of aggregation and catastrophe management at CNA. "AIR has a track record of providing scientifically credible models and combined with Touchstone, this complete solution will provide us with more analytics to make risk management, pricing, and risk selection decisions."

As part of the agreement, CNA is accessing Touchstone in the AIR Cloud as a secure and cost-efficient alternative to on-premise deployment. CNA is also licensing AIR's Web Services to connect to AIR's cloud infrastructure and obtain hazard, and loss analysis output in seconds; and Touchstone APIs to integrate with CNA's underwriting systems as part of their IT transformation efforts. For CNA's newly created National Accounts line, AIR is also providing support using its data services to scrub and prepare submissions for quotes from brokers.

"CNA emphasized the importance of account modeling time and its impact on workflow efficiency," said Rob Newbold, executive vice president at AIR Worldwide. "The ability of Touchstone to model multiple perils at one time, coupled with our powerful Web Services tools to help reduce manual steps such as data transformations and analysis setup, will help improve their overall productivity and integrate seamlessly within their large property and small/middle market underwriting systems."

"It's been a positive experience working with AIR as they provided a unique solution to help streamline our workflows," continued Stone. "Through this customization we are able to achieve levels of performance and speed not possible in our previous solution. Touchstone is truly a versatile technology solution that has significantly sped-up our entire underwriting process. Additionally, AIR's implementation team was fully supportive of our needs and made the transition go smoothly, significantly mitigating the potential impact of transitioning to a new model vendor."

Touchstone is a total risk management solution designed to perform the advanced analytics that companies need to own their risk. Since 2013, more than 30 (re)insurance carriers have switched to AIR's advanced modeling platform to help them better manage catastrophe risk.