PCS remains focused on its core offering

Despite the recent headlines relating to its involvement in ILS, Property Claim Services remains committed to its core value of providing catastrophe loss data to the traditional market.

That is the news from Tom Johansmeyer, director of marketing at PCS, who told Bermuda:Re that PCS’s work “helps to underpin what the market does—both in the traditional and ILS market”—but that its focus would remain firmly fixed on working with traditional insurance and reinsurance clients.

Johansmeyer says that traditional clients depend on PCS data to benchmark claims, develop new products and establish loss reserves. “Having PCS data in place, they are not flying blind”, says Johansmeyer, with catastrophe loss data from the firm enabling them to establish an informed opinion of the market.

According to Joe Louwagie, assistant vice president at PCS, the company “targets 70 percent market share for each estimate in the US and Canada.”

Addressing rising interest in ILS, Johansmeyer says PCS is happy to work with convergence players either as the index trigger for their transactions or as a benchmark for the understanding of indemnity deals, but adds that ILS transactions are a welcome consequence of the work they do in the traditional insurance and reinsurance space, rather than a focus.

“We are not dependent on the ILS space for our continuing evolution. We are going with our core value first”, says Johansmeyer.

Nevertheless, ILS transactions with PCS index triggers are common. In 2013 14 ILS transactions utilised PCS as their index trigger, amounting to $2.8 billion of the $7.2 billion of ILS transactions issued during the year. While a number of ILS transactions employed PCS catastrophe designation as an adjunct to indemnity triggers.