Boston, October 28, 2007 -- Collins has introduced CatXplorer™, a desktop portfolio management tool for insurers that provides a high level of flexibility and user control in analyzing portfolios of property or workers' compensation insurance business.

The new desktop application was introduced at the annual meeting of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) in Boston.

"Major catastrophe issues confront insurance executives today, and affect their businesses from top to bottom," commented Collins President and Chief Executive Officer Pat Denzer. "CatXplorer includes advances and features designed to provide those executives with an immediate and effective management tool."

Daniel Bilot, senior vice president-analytical services, Collins, explained how CatXplorer helps insurers contain, organize and control the seemingly endless data they confront each day - losses, premium, underwriting details, risk characteristics, and other information - and enables them to evaluate it more efficiently.

"CatXplorer takes data - all the information recorded and collected by insurers - and distills it into an easy-to-use tool that helps insurance executives manage their business effectively and make informed, strategic business decisions," Bilot said.

With CatXplorer, insurers can view, map, track and analyze their property or workers' compensation portfolios via a "thin" desktop application. The program gives insurers access to a data "warehouse" with all the information provided to Collins on their books of business.

That includes all information used to model insurance portfolios; for example, construction type, year built, employee counts, building limits and coverage limits. Bilot added, however, that the system also stores other information not used in catastrophe modeling, including premiums, agent names, non-catastrophe loss ratios and other details on the portfolio.

"CatXplorer enables the executive to drill down into that data and produce very meaningful and useful results," Bilot said. "As with modeling, for example, it can show the insurer concentrations of risk in specific areas, or risks that are in the path of catastrophes." He noted that CatXplorer has been used in recent days to help Southern California insurers identify insured locations in wildfire areas, or in the paths of the onrushing fires.

"But CatXplorer also enables the insurer to perform other multi-variable analyses that aren't related to catastrophes, but yield immensely important information on a book of business," he said. "Most significantly, the user can quickly identify risks or subsets risks in a portfolio that may be driving a disproportionate level of the overall losses.

"These multi-variable analyses, which in the past have been complex and time-consuming, are created in seconds through simple mouse clicks," Bilot said

All the information in the data warehouse is linked to a geographic information system to apply mapping, aerial photography, live weather data, and other factors to evaluate the risks insured and exposures to an insurer's book of business.

Bilot said two other advances reflected in CatXplorer are its "dynamic filtering" capability and the ease with which the user can extract and display information in a variety of formats.

"The user can filter information by any variables in the portfolio," Bilot said. "This allows for quick and easy movement between subsets of risks - say, screening insured homes by a construction characteristic, then moving to a different type of variable, such as limits, premium or agent.

"The user can quickly go from the portfolio level, to a subset of the portfolio, and back again, applying filters according to a wide variety of variables," Bilot said.

Information is easily extracted into many different formats, for example, in an Excel spreadsheet or on a map. "To use this information in strategic decision-making, it's essential to have the information in a format that can be deployed effectively," Bilot said.

Collins is introducing CatXplorer to clients throughout the Jan. 1, 2008 renewal season. As the system is adopted and used by insurers, new features are planned to enhance CatXplorer's capabilities.