LiveCat : Development of an internal global real-time disaster loss estimation tool

LiveCat is a disaster response tool operationally used at AXA to provide impact assessment at group level within 24 hours of a natural event occurrence. It covers several natural catastrophe perils at a global scale: earthquakes, floods, cyclones, European windstorms, etc. Providing a rapid loss estimation is essential for operational purposes such as claims management and communication to key stakeholders, to quickly deliver a response proportional to the event’s magnitude and likely impact.

The overall methodology consists of (1) recovering or generating an alert according to a predefined threshold, (2) defining the event spatial characteristics and intensity, (3) identifying AXA customers and insured value within the event footprint, (4) modeling destruction rates and applying contractual terms (co-insurance, deductibles, limits, etc.), (5) estimating the claims number and associated losses and (6) generating the appropriate reporting and communication supports.

LiveCat is directly integrated within the modelling ecosystem deployed at AXA and its internal R&D and expertise on natural hazards. Several internal AXA tools are supporting this impact assessment platform: a global insurance contract database gathering 40m+ insured risks (with detailed physical, financial and coverage descriptions), an internal hazard and financial modeling platform (running internal cat models at event scale and producing loss estimates per risk), and our internal geospatial solution for Nat Cat underwriting.

Finally, LiveCat estimates are refined post-event and archived to consolidate the assessment of model backtesting and modelling methodology by matching actual collected claims and field feedback.