PERILS AG is an initiative of the European insurance industry and delivers market data for natural catastrophe risks and losses in Europe. The developed continuously extended platform covers storm risks, flood risks and earthquake risks for 18 European countries, based on data of more than 100 insurance groups for more than 5’000 geographical risk zones.
Catastrophe Insurance Data
PERILS AG is based in Zurich and operates an IT platform, where insurance companies can submit exposure and loss data in a highly secure manner. Based on the insurance data PERILS calculates market exposure and losses which are available for subscribers. The PERILS loss index is used in a large number of ILS and ILW transactions. By Sep 30, 2013, 4.3 Billion USD PERILS-based capacity was at risk.
Project approach
PERILS AG has been a customer of mp technology since 2009. Based on the well established Storyboard-Workshop approach, PERILS and mp technology have specified in a joint effort the requirements of the platform and the target software architecture. The system implementation followed with a monthly release cycle and in close cooperation with the PERILS personnel to ensure that the target system would fulfill the needs of PERILS. This approach made a very tight timeline realistic with an initial public version of the system available six months after PERILS had been incorporated as a company.
System Architecture
The following aspects were essential for the implementation of the PERILS platform.
- Usability
End users are guided through the process with a modern Web UI which supports efficient and user friendly data management and data retrieval. Backend users can quickly process large amounts of data and can still keep an overview of all intermediate results for validation purpose. - Performance and Scalability
The system processes complex loss estimations with large datasets in short time. An increase in input data only leads to higher execution time, but will not endanger the stability of the system.
- Security
The complete system architecture has been designed with security and sensitivity of the data in mind. A web application firewall is used to enforce multi-factor authentication and data submitted by insurance companies is immediately encrypted and anonymized before being processed. - Quality
The system’s data quality is ensured with manual verification workflows for data from insurance providers and a very large number of automated test cases for the complex calculations and the user interface.
PERILS Website
The PERILS portal can be accessed via the PERILS website. The portal’s natural disaster databases can only be viewed by registered users. www.perils.org ›
Development
The PERILS platform is continuously developed further by mp technology. In the meantime (as of March 2018), the system covers windstorm, flood and earthquake risks in 18 European countries as well as Australia and Canada, based on data from more than 100 insurance groups for over 20’000 geographical risk zones. Future plans include expansion to other natural hazards and additional countries.
05. September 2013
