These days, insurance underwriting demands more than traditional data and reactive strategies. Underwriters need precision, foresight, and confidence, especially in a region as volatile as Australia and New Zealand. That’s where Early Warning Network (EWN) steps in.
At the upcoming UAC CFC 2025 Melbourne Market Exchange, we’re proud to be showcasing how our cutting-edge weather intelligence tools are purpose-built to support underwriters in making informed, risk-adjusted decisions. Here’s how.
Timing is everything in underwriting, especially when it comes to managing exposure during rapidly evolving severe weather events. That’s why EmbargoPlus, EWN’s industry-leading embargo management tool, has become a game-changer for insurers and underwriters alike.
EmbargoPlus is a map-based, real-time embargo platform allowing insurers to proactively restrict or adjust new business and policy changes based on weather threats. It integrates directly with EWN’s verified severe weather data and alerts, providing real-time situational awareness and operational control.
Why does it matter for underwriters? Well, traditionally, embargoes are reactive, communicated via static emails or PDFs that may arrive too late. EmbargoPlus flips this model by allowing underwriters and product teams to:
Create custom embargo zones based on real-time radar, forecast, and alert data
Automate embargo triggers using pre-set thresholds for hazards like flood, bushfire, and cyclone
Visualise the risk footprint so you can understand which postcodes or suburbs fall within an active threat area
Coordinate across teams, ensuring brokers, underwriters, and operations are aligned on risk response
Imagine a fast-developing supercell moving toward a metropolitan fringe. As EWN issues a high-confidence alert, EmbargoPlus can automatically trigger a temporary halt on new policy issuance in the projected impact zone, avoiding the risk of last-minute, high-risk policies that drive loss ratios up.
EmbargoPlus helps underwriters make confident, data-driven decisions without delaying quoting or relying on slow manual processes. It’s the missing link between real-world risk and responsive underwriting, with data available by Postcode, SalCode, polygon and GNAF lookup.
Great underwriting starts with a deep understanding of not just today’s climate risk, but the patterns and extremes that define a region’s long-term hazard profile. That’s why EWN created Climatics: a purpose-built platform delivering historical severe weather insights tailored for insurance applications.
Climatics is a spatial data platform that provides insurers and underwriters with decades of high-resolution historical hazard data, including:
Flood
Thunderstorms
Bushfire
Hail
Tropical Cyclones
Lightning (and more)
The platform helps underwriters visualise, quantify, and compare risk exposure across assets, postcodes, portfolios, or entire underwriting regions. Users can drill into specific addresses or regions to assess historical exposure, benchmark hazard intensity and recurrence to guide premium setting, and identify loss hotspots that warrant additional scrutiny or pricing adjustment.
Climatics is especially valuable for:
New business evaluation: Screen submissions for hazard alignment
Portfolio monitoring: Understand where accumulations of high-risk properties exist
Renewal strategy: Flag properties in areas with deteriorating risk profiles
Data-led conversations: Arm brokers, reinsurers, and actuaries with hazard intelligence
Unlike broad-scale climate models or open datasets, Climatics is tuned for operational insurance use, with asset-level resolution, clean interfaces, and integration into underwriting workflows.
While historical data helps underwriters price risk, forecasting helps them actively manage it, especially in volatile or transitioning weather patterns. EWN’s Forecast Services are designed to give underwriters and insurers a strategic lead time advantage, enabling more agile, forward-looking decision-making during periods of elevated risk.
Our Forecast Services provide daily and event-based predictive insights tailored for operational risk and offer lead-time clarity on developing threats — not just alerts after the fact.
As Underwriters often operate in tight windows where real-time quoting, renewals, or policy changes happen, EWN forecasts allow them to pre-emptively resources while staying informed of emerging threats via forecast bulletins, dashboards, or API integrations and align teams across underwriting, claims, and distribution with a shared view of forecast risk.
EWN’s multi-day severe weather forecasts anticipate events which could be damaging to assets. Receiving this information enables underwriters to set early embargoes, adjust acceptance rules, or flag higher-risk quotes for manual review well before radar even picks up activity.
Tropical cyclones remain one of the most devastating and high-impact weather perils for insurers operating across northern Australia, coastal Queensland, the NT, and WA. For underwriters managing exposure in these regions, cyclone season needs to be about early, confident, and informed decision-making.
EWN’s Tropical Cyclone Services provide insurers with a dedicated, end-to-end suite of insights, forecasts, and alerts developed by experienced meteorologists and risk experts. The services deliver real-time tracking, expert commentary, and hazard analysis from the earliest signs of a tropical low to landfall and post-impact assessments.
Tailored to the insurance industry, we provide early identification of tropical disturbances and cyclone formation, forecasts with likely paths and potential impacts, customised alerts and briefings for portfolio-relevant areas and Integration into EmbargoPlus, enabling cyclone-based embargo automation.
Tropical cyclones present a unique underwriting challenge. They often form rapidly, change course unexpectedly, and create widespread uncertainty. EWN’s service ensures underwriters have consistent, verified intelligence that supports policy-level decisions before risk escalates.
Our Tropical Cyclone Services deliver clarity, speed, and confidence — enabling smarter underwriting during Australia’s most volatile season.
At Early Warning Network, we’re proud to support underwriters with the tools they need to navigate Australia’s increasingly volatile climate landscape. Whether you’re focused on smarter pricing, exposure management, or operational resilience, our solutions — EmbargoPlus, Climatics, Forecast Services, and Tropical Cyclone Services — are built to support informed decision-making when it matters most.
We’ll be showcasing these capabilities at the upcoming:
UAC CFC 2025 Melbourne Market Exchange – 13 May
UAC 2025 Brisbane Market Exchange – 8 July
If you're attending either event, we’d love to connect. Stop by our stand to see how EWN is helping underwriters reduce uncertainty, improve response times, and build more resilient insurance portfolios.