Praedicat unveils ‘game-changing’ tool for underwriting complex emerging risks

Praedicat, a liability emerging risk analytics company, has launched a new tool that it claims will “vastly simplify” the underwriting of complex emerging risks for liability insurance.

Praedicat has designed a new ‘Company Risk Score’, available in its emerging risk software product CoMeta, for general liability, directors’ & offices’ (D&O), and products liability underwriting and risk management.

It applies machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to identify emerging risks in scientific literatures. Once new risks are identified, the literatures are tracked over time as they acquire the characteristics needed to be admitted as scientific evidence in litigation. Praedicat connects the commercial exposures associated with the risks to the business activities of companies, and then quantifies the probability of litigation for any company and any particular risk.

The risks covered include chemicals and plastics, products such as cell phones, environmental exposure such as diesel, climate risks from greenhouse gases, and new materials and technologies such as nanotech. Ongoing mass litigation events like those centered on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), agricultural and consumer herbicides, arsenic-laden baby food, and talcum powder are built into the scoring.  New risks are added regularly, and the scores will evolve as new risks emerge and as companies themselves develop and improve their business operations.  Users can drill down as far as is needed to understand the risk, from the overall score to the company’s at-risk business activities and all the way to the underlying science.

“This is a game-changer,” said David Loughran, senior vice president of product and co-founder of Praedicat. “ Praedicat’s Company Risk Score distills text data describing risk from tens of thousands of published scientific articles, connects the risks to over 100,000 companies, and then summarizes the connections for any company into one actionable score. It's never been more important to underwrite with forward-looking data, and now it’s never been easier.”

Julia Fuller, senior vice president, account management at Praedicat, added: “Our clients rely on Praedicat’s emerging risk information to create analytical underwriting strategies and for risk selection. They’ve asked for a simple way to benchmark risk and to triage underwriting resources. That’s what the new score is designed to deliver.”

Loughran added: “With increasing scrutiny on the environmental impact of commercial operations, and with growing risk of mass litigation in the current social inflation environment, the Company Risk Score is a must-have input to liability underwriting. Though emerging risks are getting more complex, the Company Risk Score is making underwriting these risks a whole lot simpler.”

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