ISO’s Actuarial Service

ISO’s Actuarial Service provides the information you need to enhance your decision making and boost your productivity and profitability. Using ISO’s data to supplement your own experience, you’ll be able to make better-informed decisions about product pricing, marketing, underwriting, reserve adequacy, and reinsurance needs.

Through the service, you get timely, accurate information on such topics as loss and premium trend, risk classifications, loss development, increased limits factors, catastrophe and excess losses, and expenses. You get aggregate data in various levels of detail, as well as the methods, formulas, and judgments of our professional staff of actuaries.

What ISO’s Actuarial Service offers
ISO’s Actuarial Service, available by line of insurance, is a series of reports with data and analysis on a wide variety of topics. Depending on the line, the service typically includes information on:

• Fast Track – Look at the most current aggregate information on insurance trends from reports produced under the Fast Track Monitoring System.
• Trend – Estimate future costs using ISO’s analyses of how inflation and other factors affect cost levels and whether claim frequency is rising or falling.
• Loss development – Evaluate the adequacy of reserves, and conduct cash flow and investment income analyses using ISO’s aggregate insurer loss development triangles.
• Classification/territory – Use ISO’s classification and territory analyses to determine which market segments are profitable or unprofitable to target or adjust your marketing efforts.
• Increased limits – Measure costs associated with higher coverage limits to evaluate your reinsurance needs, or develop offerings, and negotiate prices.
• Catastrophe – Use ISO’s excess loss analyses and hurricane model results to assess the financial risk arising from catastrophic events.
• Size of loss – Analyze trends in loss size over time and the relationship of allocated loss adjustment expense (predominantly legal fees) to loss severity using ISO’s distribution of losses by size.
• Cause of loss – Evaluate whether a particular peril is increasing or decreasing in importance as a cost driver, and compare the distribution of losses by peril geographically using ISO’s analysis of loss trends by peril.
• Expenses – Compare your underwriting expenses against aggregate results to gauge your productivity and efficiency relative to the average, and refer to our state tax-rate information for pricing purposes.
• Residual market – Refer to ISO’s analysis of the residual market to estimate how the cost of funding that market affects your bottom line.

You’ll also receive agendas and minutes of ISO’s line actuarial panels to help you keep abreast of ratemaking research and product development.

ISO data serves as a benchmark
ISO’s compilations and analyses provide a source of data aggregated over a broad base of insurers. You can evaluate your own company’s loss and expense experience against that aggregate. Using the results of your comparison, you can focus on problem areas in your book of business and weigh alternate underwriting strategies or claims practices. You can identify profitable new markets to enter or new classes of business to write by evaluating differences in experience across states, territories, and classes.

If you need data that our standard reports don’t display, we can prepare customized reports and data files according to criteria you define. Your Actuarial Service participation entitles you to a discount on any customized report you order.

In-depth analysis that’s easy to use and understand
Our actuaries compile and analyze complex data and present the data in formats that you can easily use and understand. We’ve designed the exhibits in our circulars and written the accompanying explanations to be clear and informative. In addition to providing vital information, our circulars make valuable training and educational tools for your actuarial staff. And if you have any questions about the analyses, ISO’s professional team of actuaries is always ready to help.

Download options
As an Actuarial Service participant, you can download ISO’s Actuarial Service circulars from ISOnet® (ISO’s Internet delivery service) as PDF files and as a combination of Microsoft® Word 2003 documents (circular text) and Excel 2003 spreadsheets (circular exhibits). The spreadsheet download facilitates faster, simpler, and less error-prone integration of ISO’s aggregate data and analyses into your decision-making process.

You can take advantage of the formulas built into our Excel files to present your own company data in reports similar to ISO’s and to help automate your analyses. You can then easily compare your results with ISO’s aggregate benchmark to identify problems to address or markets in which you can competitively target your business.

And you can readily extend or adapt the analyses by changing the assumptions on trend, loss development, and other parameters, or performing "what-if" analyses to gain additional insight into the ISO calculations.

40 years of experience in 15 lines of insurance
Through participation in ISO’s Actuarial Service, you benefit from ISO’s expertise and 40 years of experience in 15 lines of insurance. You can be confident that the analyses you receive from ISO are based on accurate, credible data. ISO maintains one of the largest private databases in the world. No individual insurer’s database can even approach the size and credibility of ISO’s database.

Select the lines you need
Actuarial Service is available by line of insurance. You can select any or all of the following lines to meet your needs:

For more information . . .
. . . on ISO’s Actuarial Service — or to get in touch with a sales representative — contact ISO. You can also call us at 1-800-888-4476.