OREANDA-NEWS. Verisk Insurance Solutions, a Verisk Analytics (Nasdaq:VRSK) business, has launched a new energy insurance unit focused on transforming risk assessment, rating, and risk modeling for the oil and gas, petrochemicals, power generation, and metals and mining industries.

Drawing upon deep domain expertise and proprietary data across Verisk businesses, including ISO, AIR Worldwide, and Wood Mackenzie, the unit will develop data analytics solutions available to the global property/casualty insurance industry.

"Our new global data analytics tools and insights will help insurers underwrite with more precision, improve operational efficiencies, reduce costs, and grow profitably in this challenging market," said Maroun Mourad, senior vice president, Commercial Lines Domestic and Global, ISO. "Our robust solutions will help enable insurers to evaluate and select risks and manage portfolios based on energy and insurance industrywide data, rather than rely solely on their own experience, data sets, and tools."

Leading the new unit is Elizabeth Casas, who joined Verisk Insurance Solutions this year as managing director of energy and insurance.

"Underwriting energy risks is a highly technical process that can be extremely expensive and time-consuming," said Casas. "By pulling together Verisk's global energy and insurance capabilities we aspire to develop innovative solutions to solve some of the challenges insurers may face in this diverse and complex market. The seamless delivery of energy-specific data assets, aerial imagery, cat modeling and accumulation management tools, as well as commercial and financial intelligence, is designed as a one-stop data and analytics solution that many energy insurers have likely been looking for."

Casas has significant experience in energy insurance and reinsurance in New York, Houston, London, Colombia, and Mexico, serving most recently as vice president and senior energy underwriter at Swiss Re Houston. She started her career as an engineer at Ecopetrol in Colombia.