Insurers Zone In As Europa Technologies Launches CRESTA Upgrade

Online, January 26, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Geodata service provider Europa Technologies has announced a major upgrade to its digital CRESTA zone product for the insurance and reinsurance sectors.

CRESTA, standing for Catastrophe Risk Evaluating and Standardising Target Accumulations, is an industry standard that helps brokers and reinsurers assess and present risk based on a zoning system established by some of the world's leading reinsurers.

Through a partnership with the German data company Michael Bauer International, Europa Technologies' new product, Global CRESTA Plus, includes high resolution zone boundaries for a number of key countries.

Europa Technologies has been working with CRESTA zone data for over 13 years - longer than any other provider.

Global CRESTA Plus is based on Europa Technologies' renowned global data, as seen in Google Earth/Maps and other popular Internet-based map services.

Global CRESTA Plus includes a places gazetteer of over 850,000 locations pre-coded with CRESTA zone and sub-zone. The gazetteer includes support for place names in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, standard Arabic and simplified Chinese. This makes the product ideal for international organisations that require a standard product with extensive support for localisation.

Global CRESTA Plus is highly cost effective with attractive and flexible licence terms.

Company director and founder Warren Vick said: "Our CRESTA product is used by a number of significant organisations in the insurance sector. I am delighted that through partnership with Michael Bauer International, Global CRESTA Plus represents a significant upgrade to our product line. It is also a strong sign of our commitment to support this important industry standard."

Ray Roberts-York, managing director of Michael Bauer International, said: "We are very excited to be working with Europa Technologies on realising this new product. As a leading provider of socio-demographic data to the retail sector for expansion and location analysis, we are proud to be able to partner with Europa Technologies to provide them additional data to upgrade their product for the Insurance sector."

Global CRESTA Plus is available in a number of standard GIS data formats for easy deployment on the desktop or corporate database.

It can also be made available through the new viaEuropa service, providing CRESTA for the first time via Data as a Service (DaaS) for GIS users.

For more information, visit www.europa.uk.com.