Partnership can have "tremendous value for applications in the mortgage space"
Mortgage analytics firm RiskSpan and Verisk have announced that they are collaborating to create a “first-of-its-kind” technology for measuring and mitigating the risks of climate change to the housing industry.
Natural disasters pose a serious threat to the mortgage market. Data from Verisk pointed out that 62 million residential locations are at moderate to extreme risk of flooding.
Read more: Climate change is a concern for US home buyers and sellers
The partnership combines RiskSpan’s Edge Platform for mortgage analytics with Verisk Extreme Event Solutions’ set of models – used by companies to assess the risk from natural catastrophes and climate to a specific location or property. The two products include loan-level scoring and climate stress testing, with applications for loan screening, portfolio management, and financial disclosures.
“Our collaboration with RiskSpan will serve to greatly benefit the housing finance industry by adding critical data and analytics from Verisk’s catastrophe models during the loan screening process,” said Roger Grenier, senior vice president of Verisk’s global resilience practice. “This added layer of portfolio management can help banks and financial institutions better understand the potential risk from extreme weather events to a given property.”
“Verisk’s ground-up approach to property-specific risk analysis is the perfect complement to our loan-level approach to mortgage credit and prepayment modeling,” said Janet Jozwik, the managing director heading RiskSpan’s contribution to the new partnership. “We are excited to layer Verisk’s unique property risk scoring into our existing credit and portfolio risk framework.”
“The collaborative solution will bring together the best extreme event models, data and climate analytics to the mortgage finance industry,” said Bill Churney, president of Verisk’s Extreme Event Solutions unit. “With financial institutions facing increased pressure to factor climate risk into their decision making, we expect RiskSpan’s enhanced tools powered by Verisk to be a welcome addition to their risk management process.”
“We are thrilled to bring the powerful climate and hazard risk analytics of Verisk to our clients,” RiskSpan CEO Bernadette Kogler said. “This alliance opens the door to a world of property-level data from the insurance industry that can have tremendous value for applications in the mortgage space.”
