European windstorm largest exposure with €59.8tr insured property: PERILS

European windstorm represents the largest exposure with 186 million individual risks representing €59.8 trillion of insured property values, according to the PERILS Industry Exposure Database 2020 (IED).

The database includes updated information about property sums insured and the number of risks exposed to natural perils in 16 countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK.

The database reveals a total of $78 trillion of natural perils exposed sums insured, representing approximately 236 million property and motor policies generating a premium volume of approximately $108 billion.

The biggest exposure in the database is European windstorm, representing an increase of 4.1 percent in EUR terms (2.9 percent at constant FX rates) compared to 1 January 2019. Year-on-year variations in Australia, New Zealand, Italy and Turkey showed robust sums insured growth ranging from 5 to 20 percent.

PERILS' head of product Eduard Held stated that this loss data is used for the trigger of insurance-linked securities and ILW transactions, and the exposure data enables users to define custom-made triggers resulting in reduced basis risk for protection buyers. "The availability of high-quality market exposure and loss data based on identical sources and methodology is much valued by users of our database," he said.

Luzi Hitz, CEO of PERILS, said: "Each year, we produce the market portfolios based on the Cat-exposed sums insured data provided by insurers in each country and by calculating the market sums insured based on that data. Moving forward, we will continue to seek out opportunities to expand our coverage to cover other important Cat markets.”

In its 11th edition of the annual IED, the Zurich-based catastrophe insurance data provider also included a detailed industry exposure portfolio for the motor line of business in Australia.

Darryl Pidcock, head of PERILS Asia-Pacific, said: "This update marks the first time that motor exposure and loss data are made available in the Australian market. As motor is a major Cat-exposed line of business in this market, today’s announcement is a natural expansion of PERILS coverage to meet the needs of our subscribers. We are particularly grateful to our insurance partners who have been extremely supportive in sharing their data.”