A US company has launched a market-research information product to help underwriters identify promising markets for business development.

The compact-disc product from Insurance Services Office Inc. is known as Scoreboard Summary Report, and aims to assist users to compare economic, demographic and insurance experience of a variety of business segments.

Leveraging data from ISO's vast 5.5-billion-record database, reports from the CD can provide insurers with both US state and nationwide information to facilitate sound market-segment selections.

ISO vice president of management and information services James Surrago said the reports were unique in that they provided a multi-dimensional view of promising business niches.

"With Scoreboard reports, underwriting and marketing specialists involved in market-segmentation research will no longer have to rely on the limits of their own company's data,'' he explained.

"Nor will they have to rely on data from a purchased model, or even guesswork to evaluate the potential profitability of a prospective market segment.'' He said market segmentation had become a critical marketing strategy for most insurers in the continuing soft insurance market.

"Many companies are devoting considerable resources to find new potential market segments and to reevaluate their current market-segment programmes,'' he said.

"Insurers have told us they want actual experience data to replace their own hit or miss results.'' He said the centrepiece of the CD system's information was ISO's aggregated commercial experience for fire, general liability and business owners policies.

Scoreboard also provided loss experience information based on a large volume of statistics and insurance data based on statistics as reported instead of modelled data.

It ranked market segments based on loss ratio and loss severity to allow users to use their own judgement to quickly identify target industries, he said.