CRESTA is a non-profit organization founded in 1977 by representatives of the re-insurance branch in order to establish an industry standard for the exchange of place-based information. GfK GeoMarketing has been the official map supplier of the digital maps of the worldwide CRESTA zones since 2001. Interview with Christina Schlenther (Swiss Re).

What are CRESTA's main tasks?

CRESTA provides a universally recognized zoning standard for the insurance industry that serves as a unified geographic basis for exchanging aggregated insurance data. This promotes the accuracy and efficiency of the exchange of information among insurers and reinsurers.

There's a trend toward ever higher resolutions of spatial information. High-resolution postal boundaries are ideal for insurance companies, as these are typically well known in the market and accessible to all. Also, it's easy to aggregate postal zones if fewer zones per country are needed.

Which cartographic characteristics are particularly important for these applications?

Data quality plays a tremendously important role for CRESTA. The geometric data must be available worldwide and not have any gaps or overlaps. GfK GeoMarketing's maps offer precisely these features!

The CRESTA zones are to be adjusted in 2012 - what will this entail?

With this adjustment, CRESTA wants to move away from the now 30-year old or even older zones that often were manually created based on risks and now had to be painstakingly re-digitized for every update. The new CRESTA zones will be based on administrative and postal boundaries, as these are generally well known and available. The future zones will be defined independently of risks. We will also offer two levels of resolution in order to best meet the needs of users: The high-resolution zones will be used as basis for the premium calculation models and the lower resolution zones will be for risk management and reporting tasks. A detailed overview of the planned changes can be accessed at www.cresta.org/index.php/zone-changes

We're proud to have been the official supplier of CRESTA maps over the past 10 years and look forward to continuing to play this role. What are the most important developments in the near feature for reinsurers?

With regard to the required geographic base data, there's a clear trend toward high-resolution data, all the way down to coordinate-specific entries. The data quality of the underlying maps and geodata continues to play a paramount role.

CRESTA

CRESTA stands for "Catastrophe Risk Evaluating and Standardizing Target Accumulation" and is the name of the organization as well as the geographic standard. The CRESTA zones provide a unified basis for the exchange of aggregated, insurance-relevant information among insurers and reinsurers. More information at www.cresta.org

Christina Schlenther

Christina Schlenther has been head of the CRESTA secretariat at Swiss Re since 2006. During her time in this office, the decision to revise the CRESTA zones was made as well as the preparations for the 2012 implementation. Swiss Re alternates the running of the CRESTA secretariat with Munich Re.