Insurance industry: Political risk data is now also available for CRESTA zones

"This step in product expansion is particularly important," says Ray Roberts-York, Managing Director at MBI. "Since we have previously only used the administrative areas as a projected area for political risks, we can offer the international insurance industry significant added value with the CRESTA zones." This is because insurers and reinsurers in particular, who have so far preferred to use CRESTA zoning for their analyses, need to include political risks in their calculations. In this context, political risks include the destruction of production and storage facilities due to conflicts, but also terrorism coverage or insurance against the nationalization of foreign investments.

MBI Chief Data Scientist for political risk data, Dr. Nicolas Schwank, explains the significance of this new offering: “So far, CRESTA data have been used very successfully in assessing natural hazards. The key advantage of our new extension is that risk values for both political and natural risks can now be perfectly combined and compared. Not only do the area layouts match, but the scale level is also designed for the range zero to ten, which is identical to the data products for natural hazards. The fact that overviews for both risk values can be created in a single step makes things easier for all customers who are already using both values."

MBI CONIAS – Analysis tool for global political conflicts

With MBI CONIAS, Michael Bauer International GmbH offers a worldwide unique analysis tool for evaluating political risk data. The risk values result from the continuous observation of non-violent and violent national and international political conflicts. Globally, around 900 politically motivated conflicts all over the world are currently being monitored and their corresponding risk values are calculated based on escalation and de-escalation dynamics. CONIAS Risk Intelligence was recently named one of the leading risk management companies in Germany by Welp Magazine.

CRESTA Zones

The CRESTA zones represent the global natural hazard zones and were defined by the CRESTA organization. CRESTA is the abbreviation for "Catastrophe Risk Evaluating and Standardizing Target Accumulations". CRESTA zones are used internationally by companies in the insurance and reinsurance industry and serve as a reliable basis for estimating and illustrating regional amounts of damage from natural disasters such as drought, storms, floods and earthquakes, as well as for risk modeling.

Formats

For Geographical Information Systems (GIS), MBI offers the risk data and CRESTA zones in .shp (ESRI), .tab (MapInfo) and MIF/MID formats. Standard data formats are Tab delimited file (TXT), Access database (MDB) and Excel (xls).

Other formats are available upon request.

More information on MBI CONIAS at CRESTA zones level can be requested at https://www.mbi-geodata.com/….