Insurance Services Office
Insurance Services Office, Inc. (ISO), a subsidiary of Verisk Analytics, is a provider of data, underwriting, risk management and legal/regulatory services (with special focus on community fire-protection efforts and Building Code Effectiveness Evaluation) to property-casualty insurers and other clients. Headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA, the organization serves clients with offices throughout the United States, along with international operations offices in the United Kingdom, Israel, Germany, India and China.
Overview
Founded in 1971 in a merger of smaller underwriting service organizations, ISO has developed enormous databases of information about hundreds of millions of individual insurance policies, along with a large volume of public records pertaining to fraud, real property, employment screening, and motor vehicles. ISO also monitors regulatory standards and insurance laws, and makes many filings and other communications with regulatory authorities on behalf of its clients.
ISO became a private, for-profit company in 1997. It is owned by its member insurers and employees, and it does not publish detailed financial statements. In the fiscal year ended December, 2008 ISO's revenues were reportedly over $893.6 million. The organization employs 3,500 people worldwide, and the current chairman, president and CEO is Scott G. Stephenson.
ISO owns many trademarks.[1]
Services
ISO provides a number of risk-related services to its clients:
- statistical, actuarial, and claims data
- development of standardized insurance policy language
- risk-management information about specific locations
- fraud identification
- marketing, loss control, and premium audit
- catastrophe modeling systems
- employment screening
- rating and underwriting rules
- motor vehicle records
- litigation and regulatory support
- mortgage fraud analytics
- real estate
- healthcare cost analytics
- restoration and remodeling-estimation services and software
ISO's databases contain more than 11 billion detailed records relating to insurance and risk management,[citation needed] which form the basis for its information services. ISO employs many members of the Casualty Actuarial Society and other insurance professionals to develop its risk-related products and services.