Verisk Analytics, Inc.
Verisk Analytics (VRSK)
Overview
Verisk Analytics is a data analytics and technology company that serves the global insurance industry, providing the risk assessment, underwriting, and claims data that insurers rely on to price policies and manage losses. Headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, Verisk traces its roots to 1971, when it began as the Insurance Services Office (ISO), a consolidation of state insurance rating bureaus; it went public in October 2009 in what was the largest U.S. IPO of that year. Today the company employs roughly 8,000 people across more than 20 countries and generated approximately $3.07 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025, with operating income of about $1.34 billion, making it one of the most profitable and highest-margin businesses in the S&P 500. It is listed on Nasdaq and is a component of both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 indices.
What They Do & How They Make Money
Verisk's business is built on proprietary data. Over decades it has amassed enormous, hard-to-replicate datasets covering property characteristics, claims histories, catastrophe risk, and actuarial loss trends, which it licenses to insurance carriers, reinsurers, agents, and government agencies through subscriptions and transaction-based fees. Rather than selling one-off reports, Verisk embeds its data feeds, software, and analytics directly into insurers' underwriting and claims workflows, which creates high switching costs and produces recurring, subscription-like revenue. Its tools help insurers decide what to charge for a policy (underwriting and rating), model the potential cost of catastrophic events like hurricanes and wildfires (catastrophe modeling), detect fraud, and streamline the claims process after a loss occurs (estimating repair costs, managing total-loss vehicle salvage, and so on). Because Verisk sits at the center of the U.S. property-casualty insurance ecosystem — most insurers use some combination of its products — it benefits from strong network effects and industry-standard status.
Business Segments
Following a series of divestitures over the past several years (it sold Wood Mackenzie in 2022 and its 3E/specialized markets businesses, and exited financial services data), Verisk has repositioned itself as a "pure-play" insurance data analytics company organized around two reporting segments:
- Underwriting — the larger of the two segments, generating about $2.18 billion in revenue in 2025 (up roughly 7.7% year over year). It includes core products such as policy language and loss-cost data (through ISO), underwriting data and analytics, catastrophe modeling (AIR Worldwide), geospatial and property intelligence, and life insurance technology solutions. This segment provides the data insurers use to decide what and how to price a risk before a policy is written.
- Claims — generated about $893 million in revenue in 2025 (up about 4.1% reported, 5.7% on an organic constant-currency basis). This segment includes Xactware's property-estimating software (widely used by contractors and insurers to estimate repair costs), auto and property claims solutions, salvage and total-loss vehicle marketplaces, and anti-fraud tools used after a claim is filed.
Underwriting is the larger and faster-growing segment and typically carries higher margins, given its data-licensing nature; Claims involves more software and marketplace-style transaction revenue.
Competitors
Verisk operates in a specialized niche with relatively few direct, full-scope competitors, though it faces competition on a segment-by-segment basis:
- LexisNexis Risk Solutions (RELX) — overlaps heavily in underwriting data, identity verification, and claims analytics.
- CoreLogic (now part of Cotality) — competes in property data, catastrophe risk, and claims/repair-estimating solutions, directly rivaling Xactware.
- Moody's RMS and CoreLogic/Cotality — compete in catastrophe and climate-risk modeling against AIR Worldwide.
- Guidewire, Duck Creek, and other insurance software vendors — compete for parts of the underwriting and claims technology stack, though they are more platform-focused than data-focused.
- In-house data science teams at large insurers (e.g., Progressive, Allstate) — represent an indirect competitive threat as large carriers build proprietary analytics capabilities, though most still rely on Verisk as a supplement.
Competitive Position
Verisk's moat rests on decades of accumulated, proprietary loss and property data that would be extremely difficult and time-consuming for a new entrant to replicate, combined with deep integration into insurers' core underwriting and claims systems. This entrenchment gives Verisk pricing power and very high margins, and its shift toward a pure-play insurance analytics model (after shedding non-core businesses like Wood Mackenzie) has sharpened its focus and improved capital efficiency. The company continues to expand its addressable market through acquisitions — including a pending roughly $2.35 billion deal for roofing-estimation software company AccuLynx and the 2025 acquisition of McKenzie Intelligence Services to strengthen catastrophe and geospatial event analysis — and new offerings addressing emerging risks such as data-center and AI-infrastructure exposure. Key risks include the cyclicality of the insurance industry (soft pricing cycles can pressure customer budgets), the potential for large insurers to build competing in-house analytics capabilities, regulatory and data-privacy scrutiny of aggregated consumer and property data, integration risk from ongoing M&A, and the possibility that AI-driven tools could lower the barriers for competitors to develop rival risk-scoring models over time.