PERILS has announced the expansion of its market coverage to include exposure and event loss data for European floods.

The Zurich-based company, which provides independent, industry-wide catastrophe insurance data, unveiled the new service to reinsurers gathered in Monte Carlo.

The new service reflects the increasing effect in Europe of convective storms, and is in addition to PERILS’ windstorm coverage in the region.

“The benefits of our data are really very fundamental,” PERILS chief executive officer Luzi Hitz told Monte Carlo Today, noting that wind and flood events in Europe generate industry losses of €500 million or more.

“It is market-level and industry-level exposure and event loss data that can be used to understand the risk better.”

By setting a threshold of €500 million for pan-European events and €300m for individual countries, PERILS believes this achieves the correct balance between ensuring it continues to provide relevant event loss data, while also ensuring the reporting requirements for its data-providing insurance companies are not overly burdensome.

After a large natural catastrophe, PERILS collects and then aggregates event loss data from the affected insurance companies and then, about six weeks later, provides an industry loss report.

“It’s something that’s extremely obvious to do but, can you believe it, before we were founded in 2009, nobody did it except an entity in the US,” Hitz said.

“It was brokers and reinsurers who gave some estimates, but it was never on a systematic, specialised and independent basis,” he added.

In June, PERILS announced its expansion to coverage of wind and flood in Japan.

“There is a lot of discussion with capacity now and where it’s invested, especially in cat,” the company’s head of Asia-Pacific, Darryl Pidcock, said.

“In Australia, we had the February to March floods, which was one of the largest flood events historically, and you’re looking at claims being settled for policyholders at less than 50 percent because it takes time to get the assessors in. For flood especially it can take potentially six to 12 months to settle a claim.

“We move where the international reinsurance market demands. We’re always working on what’s next. It took a few years for Japan and that’s a great achievement, but there will be more,” he concluded.