Insurance Solutions at Moody’s: Building the Future of Underwriting
By Busy Cummings, Senior Director, Moody’s
Underwriters are not drowning in data; they are struggling to make sense of it. The real challenge lies in synthesizing information and understanding how those interpretations shape decisions.
For too long, insurers have known they are asked to make high-stakes decisions using fragmented inputs and legacy systems that have provided limited visibility into the full spectrum of risk.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce a deep, long-term, and broad initiative aimed at changing all that. The launch of Moody’s suite of underwriting solutions represents a strategic effort to unify disparate insights and tools—supported by risk science and AI— and all built specifically to support P&C underwriting and rating teams succeed in an era of exponential risk.
For over 20 years, Moody’s has helped provide innovative risk management solutions for the insurance industry, from supporting actuarial and life insurance teams, pioneering catastrophe modeling through RMS, and illuminating emerging casualty perils with Praedicat. Moody’s is now pushing the boundaries of property intelligence with CAPE to consistently lead the way in how risk is understood, quantified, and acted upon.
If we focus on property, clients using Moody’s underwriting solutions will benefit from a powerful, unified combination of analytics and capabilities: property intelligence from CAPE, modeled loss and hazard data from Moody’s Location Intelligence API, and additional insights derived from Moody’s global data estate.
These solution advancements will provide property underwriters access to property-level building attributes, exposure metrics, and broader location risk signals, all in one place.
It means underwriters are not just able to assess the condition, characteristics, and vulnerability of a property, but also the present and future risks it faces, and how those risks interact with the surrounding environment. For property actuaries, it means more predictive inputs, fine-tuned segmentation, and the ability to calibrate pricing models with data that reflects both historical performance and future conditions.
Broaden your data horizons
This breadth and depth of available property intelligence insight is a global initiative that spans lines of business. Moody’s footprint of property analytics covers continents and peril zones, as well as admitted and non-admitted homeowners, small commercial, mid-market, and large and specialty commercial lines.
Insurers will be able to apply consistent standards across their multi-national operations while accounting for local variations, whether underwriting hurricane risk for a condo complex in Florida, wildfire risk for a single-family home in California, flood exposure for an industrial plant in Germany, or cyclone vulnerability for a small business in Queensland.
Moving beyond property
We are also extending this new approach and expanding underwriting capabilities for casualty insurers, including general liability, financial lines, and cyber; all lines that have grown in complexity but remain underserved by traditional analytics.
Moody’s casualty solutions are built to reflect how liability risk actually manifests across entities, sectors, and time, as we help underwriters move from generalized assumptions around liability to exposure-specific insights by combining entity resolution with science- and law-informed exposure modeling.
We can help facilitate earlier detection of emerging liability risks and sharpen the segmentation of clients’ portfolios by using Moody’s global data estate, combined with structured signals from litigation trends, regulatory shifts, and scientific and academic scholarship. The insights generated from these new capabilities are designed to integrate into client underwriting workflows, improving risk selection and pricing, and supporting portfolio management strategy with speed, clarity, and confidence.
What makes this initiative possible is Moody’s blend of analytics and data. We believe that few organizations possess a data estate with the necessary breadth and technical depth, together with the institutional trust required to build underwriting solutions that are both globally available and locally relevant.
Moody’s commitment to creating next-generation insurance underwriting solutions builds upon a trusted data estate, applying new technologies and workflows to provide the financial backbone and analytical rigor that insurers expect. It is designed to overcome information asymmetry and bring underwriters closer to insights that reduce uncertainty, allowing decisions to be made with clarity and confidence.
With the launch of this strategic initiative, Moody’s also envisions a future of the ‘hybrid underwriter’, armed with high-order analytics and AI, predictive signals, and contextual data, that can assess risk with speed and precision. Moody’s long-term commitment to underwriting as a discipline will help insurers manage risk, price accurately, and better protect the insureds they serve.
We look forward to supporting underwriters and actuaries with the data, systems, and foresight they need to make better decisions, faster, and with greater certainty.