Verisk
Verisk, formally Verisk Analytics, Inc., is a data analytics and risk assessment company headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, in the United States. It serves the insurance and energy industries recorded in this directory's entry, and in its current form describes itself as a strategic data analytics and technology partner to the global insurance industry. Its catastrophe, weather and claims data services are cited throughout insurance and business news. Verisk belongs in a directory of information agencies because so much of what it sells is syndicated information: pooled industry statistics, standardized policy language, catastrophe models, claims databases and loss estimates, produced centrally from data contributed by many insurers and distributed back to the industry as a shared factual foundation for pricing, underwriting and claims decisions.
Origins as ISO in 1971
Verisk began as the Insurance Services Office, known throughout the industry as ISO, in 1971. ISO started as a not-for-profit organization that pooled insurance statistics and helped carriers meet state filing requirements — collecting data from many property and casualty insurers, producing actuarial and statistical analyses no single company could build alone, and supplying standardized information that insurers used in their regulatory filings. Company histories note that ISO later expanded its information into areas including automobile claims, fire protection and prevention, and terrorism risks. The ISO name remains recognized inside the modern company's product line, and the original pooling idea still explains Verisk's business: insurers contribute data, Verisk aggregates and analyzes it, and the resulting benchmarks, models and databases are licensed back across the industry.
Becoming Verisk and going public
The organization later reorganized for the public markets under the Verisk Analytics name. Verisk Analytics was formed as the parent and listing vehicle around ISO — one account describes it as spun off from ISO in 2008 — and in 2009 the company completed its initial public offering on Nasdaq under the ticker VRSK. Its headquarters address is 545 Washington Boulevard in Jersey City, across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, placing it within the New York metropolitan financial and insurance district while basing it in New Jersey. From that base the public company grew by acquisition and product development from a statistical and actuarial service for United States property and casualty insurers into a multinational analytics group with teams in more than twenty countries.
Underwriting and ISO services
The historic ISO business remains one of Verisk's pillars. Its offerings include industry data and standardized insurance information — the advisory policy forms, rules, loss costs and rating information that United States property and casualty insurers use as the starting point for their own products — together with predictive analytics and decision support for assessing risk, setting prices and improving underwriting. Company profiles summarize the insurance offer as solutions that help insurers assess risk, support underwriting, manage claims, detect fraud and improve pricing and operational decision-making across property and casualty, life and specialty markets. Because so many insurers build on the same ISO foundation, changes in its forms and loss costs ripple through the American insurance market and are reported as industry news in their own right.
Extreme event and catastrophe modelling
Verisk's catastrophe modelling arm descends from AIR Worldwide. AIR was founded as Applied Insurance Research in 1987 by catastrophe model developer Karen Clark, and was perhaps the first recognized catastrophe modeller for the global insurance and reinsurance industry. ISO acquired the company in 2002 and renamed it AIR Worldwide. Under Verisk, AIR became one of the dominant forces in insurance and reinsurance risk modelling and analytics, and a prolific provider of risk modelling services to the catastrophe bond market. Verisk later folded the AIR name into its main brand, where the business is known as Extreme Event Solutions; its models, developed by AIR Worldwide Corporation as a wholly owned Verisk subsidiary, cover more than one hundred and twenty countries and regions. Its Global Modelled Catastrophe Losses reporting, produced with the same model suite clients use, is a regular reference in coverage of insured disaster losses, and its platforms let insurers and reinsurers run detailed catastrophe scenarios across large portfolios to support underwriting, reinsurance purchasing and capital management.
Claims, property data and Xactware
A second family of services addresses what happens after a loss. Verisk's property estimating and claims management tools include Xactware, whose Xactimate estimating system is widely used to price building repairs. ISO ClaimSearch is the industry's claims database, used to check claim histories and combat fraud, and ISO's PCS service issues catastrophe bulletins identifying major loss events. Geomni, a Verisk business with a database of address and location based property analytics, collects aerial and ground level imagery of structures using aircraft, satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles and mobile devices; after major catastrophes it has provided high-resolution before-and-after imagery of affected areas, accessible through offerings including PCS bulletins, Xactimate, ClaimSearch and AIR's ALERT service, to help experts deploy resources, set loss reserves and verify estimates. Together these services make Verisk a routine source in disaster coverage: its catastrophe designations, loss estimates and imagery inform how insurers, reinsurers and news outlets describe an event's scale.
Refocusing on insurance
For a period Verisk operated well beyond insurance, in energy, financial services, environmental health and safety and other risk fields. In 2022, according to company histories, Verisk sold its 3E environmental unit, its financial services business and its energy business, leaving the firm with a single reportable segment: insurance. Management presentations since then have described acquisition criteria focused solely on insurance-related opportunities — proprietary data, expansion of addressable insurance markets and products that improve customer workflow or the use of Verisk data — and increased investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning applied to the insurance data the company has gathered since 1971. The refocus matters for readers of this directory: earlier descriptions of Verisk as an insurance, energy and financial services group reflect the diversified period, while the current company is, by its own account, an insurance data and technology business.
Scale
Profiles of the company report a workforce in the region of seven to nine thousand employees in the mid-2020s and annual revenues of about 2.9 billion dollars in 2023, figures that vary by source and year but consistently place Verisk among the largest specialist data companies in the world. It operates in more than twenty countries, serving carriers, reinsurers, brokers, regulators and other risk-focused organizations. Its customers are institutions rather than consumers: the individual policyholder never buys a Verisk product, yet Verisk data may sit behind the price of their policy, the estimate for their claim and their insurer's decision about how much catastrophe risk to carry in their area.
Role in insurance news
Verisk's outputs enter public circulation continuously. Its catastrophe models shape the loss figures quoted after hurricanes, earthquakes and severe storms; its annual and periodic modelled loss reports are summarized by reinsurance and insurance trade publications; its cargo theft and claims fraud findings are issued as news releases; and its analysts and data appear in business coverage of insurance pricing, climate risk and extreme events. The company maintains a newsroom for the purpose, presenting itself as helping build resilience for individuals, communities and businesses through data analytics, software and scientific research. In the terms of this directory, Verisk functions as a data agency for a single vast industry: a Jersey City service whose pooled statistics, models and databases are syndicated to insurers worldwide and cited wherever insurance risk is reported.
Summary
Verisk traces its history to the Insurance Services Office of 1971, a not-for-profit pooling of United States insurance statistics. Reorganized as Verisk Analytics and listed on Nasdaq in 2009, headquartered at 545 Washington Boulevard in Jersey City, it built — through ISO's standardized data, the AIR Worldwide catastrophe models, Xactware's estimating tools and the ClaimSearch database — the industry's central analytics infrastructure. Having sold its energy, financial services and environmental businesses in 2022, it now concentrates entirely on insurance, with teams in more than twenty countries and data services that are cited throughout insurance and business news.
