The upsurge in civil unrest across the Middle East and North Africa this year has seen regime change, and violence both in terms of government efforts to quell protests to an all our revolt in Libya which ahs garnered the support of an international military coalition.

Just like Eastern Europe a decade ago there is a real belief that the events which started in morocco and Egypt and have spread to Bahrain. Syria and Libya will continue to be contagious and therefore the concern for underwriters ahs been how to measure the exposure they are assuming, on behalf of their cedants.

However intelligence firm Exclusive Analysis believes it has created a system which can deliver the detail needed not only to ensure that underwriters can obtain a detailed understanding of the risk levels per country but also down to a 500 metre square of any place on the planet.

Every Point on the Planet (EPOP) is the risk assessment tool which Exclusive Analysis say will aid the reinsurers in the decision making process when it comes to capital allocation.

David Hunt the firm’s Head of Research & Development said: “There has always been an issue fore the reinsurance market in terms of how they judge the threat posed by political risk, war and terrorism. It is not like wind storm or earthquake risk where there are in many ways set parameters and the data from the cedant can be fairly board in terms of the areas they want include din their treaty coverages.”

He added the EPOP system can be used to drill down into very precise areas of the world which will enable reinsurers to understand the areas they feel comfortable to offer coverage.

“If you look at the current situation and the market is not really interested in Libya and the Lebanon and Syria are seen as areas of concern,” said Mr Hunt. “However with EPOP reinsurer can get data on very precise areas which means they can understand the risks and identify those areas of a country which is deemed high risk which are actually attractive to underwrite at the premium levels charged.

“This will identify individual locations in a treaty programme with the highest risk exposure, providing the ability to accurate assess and price the treaty.”

Mr Hunt said the system was applicable to the reinsurance market because of the ability to compare risk levels between treaties and will provide a clear breakdown of the percentage of severe, high, elevated, moderate and low level risks which have been included in the treaty to enable underwriters to quickly calibrate the risk levels.

“It makes political violence intelligence as usable and natural catastrophe data, and will complement aggregation tools and can be integrated into existing exposure management systems,” he added. “The individual risks are calibrated on our scale which is applicable across the business and the risk profiles are updated using our intelligence network which includes over 1,000 local human sources and is linked into to our existing intelligence and risk outputs.”

Cathy Wilford EA’s GIS Developer said the reinsurers can provide simple latitude and longitude co-ordinates for the risks they are being asked to cover and the information can be back with the underwriter in 24 hours.

“One of the first to use the system provided 8 million points and we retuned the risk assessments within 24 hours for each of the points,” she added. “The fact that there is a great deal more geo-coding of risks in a reinsurance treaty makes the system applicable to the market.”