Karen Clark & Company vs Verisk Extreme Event Solutions

Verdict

Karen Clark & Company and Verisk Extreme Event Solutions share an unusual history: Verisk's catastrophe-modelling division was formerly AIR Worldwide, and AIR's founder went on to found Karen Clark & Company, making this one of the more direct rivalries in the category. Both produce probabilistic loss models for hurricane, earthquake, severe convective storm and other perils across many countries, used by insurers, reinsurers and ILS managers to price and reserve for catastrophe risk.

The decisive difference is openness. Verisk's Touchstone platform is a closed, vetted, industry-standard model spanning more than 110 countries and additional perils including wildfire, terrorism, pandemic and cyber — the safer, better-known default for a team that wants an established model without managing its own event sets. Karen Clark & Company's RiskInsight platform is explicitly open: it lets users plug in their own or third-party event sets and vulnerability curves rather than accepting a vendor's black box, a direct response to the closed-model tradition its founder helped create at AIR.

Choose Karen Clark & Company if

• Your actuarial team wants to interrogate, adjust or replace the event sets and vulnerability curves behind the loss number.
• You want an alternative view alongside a closed industry-standard model, to check for model risk rather than relying on a single vendor's assumptions.
• Your peril and geographic needs fall within RiskInsight's core coverage (US, Canada, the Caribbean, Central and South America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Europe).

Choose Verisk Extreme Event Solutions if

• You want the established, widely used model across the broadest peril list and country coverage, including wildfire, terrorism, pandemic and cyber.
• Your team prefers a vetted, closed model over managing custom event sets and vulnerability curves in-house.
• You need coverage across 110+ countries from a single vendor relationship.

The honest caveat

Neither vendor publishes pricing; both licence per model or territory by quote. "Open" does not mean easier — running your own event sets and vulnerability curves through RiskInsight requires modelling expertise most teams do not build in-house for a first catastrophe-model deployment, so evaluate the open model on whether you actually have the actuarial capacity to use its flexibility, not just on the appeal of transparency. For broader category context, including free federal hazard data and infrastructure-resilience alternatives, see how to choose a catastrophe modelling platform.