Data Management Concepts

Touchstone introduced some new data management concepts:

Projects

Projects are a primary organizational concept in Touchstone. They provide a workspace for you and a container (analogous to folders in Windows Explorer) for:

• Exposure data (one or more exposure views that can represent exposure sets on one or more databases)

• Analysis results

• Reinsurance programs

• Reports

You associate a project with one or more exposure databases and servers, one or more exposure sets and views, and analyses and reports. Depending on your user role and how your business units are managed, you may have access to your projects and/or to other users' projects.

Exposure Sets

An exposure set is a user-defined collection of contracts and locations including their related financial terms, such as perils, limit type, and deductible type. An exposure set resides on a single CEDE database, which can contain multiple exposure sets. Exposure sets are the building blocks for exposure views.

Exposure Views

Exposure views are logical groupings of exposure data within projects. They can contain one or more exposure sets. While exposure sets relate to data storage in the back-end databases, exposure views relate to data organization in the user interface. Exposure views comprise exposure sets with optional filters that you can export and import. The exposure sets in an exposure view may be physically located on different exposure databases.

Business Units

Business units enable administrators to segregate data and configure different business rules and system settings that are specific to a department or an organization. Administrators assign users to business units; users work in one business unit at a time.

Policies and Certificates

Touchstone supports exposure data contained in four types of policies/certificates/treaties. The policy type determines how you code the exposure data that you want to import into Touchstone or that you want to manually add. Step functions apply only to Primary Property policies, and reinsurance applies only to Primary Property and Primary Property Workers' Compensation policies. When you select a policy type in AIR's ImportExpress, the user interface displays only the supported fields for selection of mapping set, contracts, locations, reinsurance, and step function files.

• Primary Property (PP) policies: Provide financial protection, up to the limits of a policy, against the loss of, or damage to, real and personal property caused by various perils. They pay compensation regardless of other insurance coverages the policyholder may have. The primary property insurance market is often split into broad lines of business (LOBs), as they relate to catastrophe risk: residential or personal property, commercial property, automobile lines, and offshore oil and gas risks.

• Primary Workers' Compensation (PWC) policies: Covers workers' wages and medical expenses as a result of earthquake or acts of terrorism within the United States, or can be used to model Personal Accidents (PA) covered by the Japanese earthquake model.

• Facultative Property (FP) certificates: Facultative certificates are contracts formalizing reinsurance cession on individual risks; reinsurers can accept or reject individual risks.

• Facultative Workers' Compensation (FWC) certificates: Same type of policy as facultative property certificates, but, instead of covering property, provides workers' compensation benefits.

Reinsurance Programs

Touchstone supports reinsurance terms using two different methods:

• Terms are imported with the exposure data in the form of treaties and certificates.

• Terms are specified in reinsurance programs that users select and apply when configuring a Detailed Loss Analysis.

You use AIR ImportExpress to import exposure-based reinsurance terms for facultative and surplus share reinsurance. Reinsurance programs support risk-based Quota Share treaties, per-risk excess of loss treaties, and aggregate treaties, including CAT XOL, Aggregate XOL and Per-Occurrence XOL.

Reinsurance programs consist of one or more treaties, which include the exposures to which they apply, limits, reinstatements, ceded amounts, trigger types, etc. Since they are part of the project, you can add them and modify them using the project's Reinsurance functions.