This Financial Insights report provides property and casualty and life and annuity insurers with a toolkit to develop a strong sense of place. This toolkit includes framework, select known and potential insurer spatial applications, and a spatial capability model. To further help insurers develop their spatial applications, we provide a list of data elements that spatial applications require, a glossary of key spatial terms, and a list of select spatial technology and information firms.

Barry Rabkin, senior research analyst, Insurance Advisory Service, Financial Insights, remarks that "Insurers continually tell us their three key strategic business objectives are looking for organic growth, regulatory compliance, and cost improvement. All the while they are overlooking the white elephant standing squarely in the middle of the room: location or spatial information. Conceptually, insurance executives understand that location is critically important because it directly relates to their current, emerging, and potential risks. But ask life and annuity or property and casualty insurers how they are using spatial information if indeed they are using it at all to support their strategies or operations. A growing number of insurers are using location information to support underwriting and claims - not enough by half. Insurers need to weave spatial capabilities along with real-time event information using more of their value chain. In this report, we provide frameworks, known and potential insurer spatial applications, and a spatial capability model to help them do just that."