How Verisk Sells Insurers Their Own Data Back
Hello Business Enthusiasts,
Welcome back to Business Knowledge, where every week we look at one public company that sells something forgettable and earns serious money from it. We tell the story, then dissect the habit worth stealing for your own business.
- Company in focus today: Verisk Analytics, Jersey City, New Jersey (Nasdaq: VRSK)
- What they sell: pooled insurance records and the standard policy wording insurers build their products on
- Read this twice if: your customers already send you their numbers every month and you have never sold them the combined picture
In today's issue, we look at how rival insurers pooled their records in 1971 and then sold that pool to the stock market in 2009. You'll learn how to turn data your customers already give you into a product they pay for every year, all in about five minutes.
The notebook every insurer writes in
The data your customers hand you for free can be worth more than anything you build for them. Verisk has made that bet pay for fifty-five years.
Plenty of operators would call that backwards. Customer data feels like something you lock in a drawer.
But the whole argument of this issue is that if customers hand you their data, you can sell it back to them as the standard.
Verisk earned $3.07 billion in revenue in 2025 on that very idea. The proof starts with a merger almost nobody outside insurance remembers.
The year thirty bureaus became one
In 1971, about 30 state rating bureaus merged into a single body called the Insurance Services Office, or ISO, according to a coverage history by lawyer Michael Aylward. It began as a nonprofit serving roughly 280 insurers, as former Verisk CEO Scott Stephenson explained on the World of DaaS podcast.
The reason was paperwork. US insurers must report premiums and losses to state regulators, and before ISO, they paid a separate bureau in each state to clean and format those numbers. ISO did the job once, for the whole country.
Then came the part that turned a filing service into a business. Each insurer sent in its own losses, and ISO sent back the losses of the whole market, working into suggested prices. A regional insurer with a few thousand policies could never build that picture alone.
The policy wording that became the default
ISO wrote the contracts too. Its 1973 general liability form made ISO the main source of standard policy wording for American property and casualty insurers, Aylward writes, and ISO rewrote it in 1986 under the name Commercial General Liability.
Underwriters today talk about ISO form numbers like CG 00 01 the way mechanics talk about part numbers (QuoteSweep's guide for agents calls that form the most important one in commercial insurance). A standard form saves each insurer from drafting its own contract. It also comes with decades of court rulings that already explain what each sentence covers.
So the loop closes. Insurers send in records, and ISO turns them into prices and forms. Then the same insurers pay to use the result.
A contributory database is basically a shared pool that customers fill with their own records in exchange for access to everyone else's.
The owners who sold out and stayed
Frank Coyne, a former Treasury Department trial lawyer, joined ISO as president in 1999. In 2008 he led the plan to put a new holding company, Verisk Analytics, on top of ISO and sell its shares to the public.
The timing was awful. Verisk filed for its IPO in August 2008, just before Lehman Brothers collapsed, and waited more than a year. In October 2009 it priced at $22 a share, above its planned range, and raised $1.88 billion, the biggest US IPO since Visa.
Verisk kept none of that cash. It went to the insurers who owned the shares, with AIG and Travelers among the sellers. In Des Moines, Iowa, EMC Insurance Group sold all 1,064,100 of its Verisk shares and booked a $14.6 million after-tax gain.
Selling the shares changed nothing about how those insurers wrote policies. The forms and the loss data stayed in their daily work. From then on, they arrived as a bill from a public company.
What the pool looks like now
Verisk says its products run on 39 billion premium and loss records and more than 1.9 billion claims. About 84% of its 2025 revenue came from subscriptions.
The claims pool shows why customers keep feeding it. One fraudster can file the same claim with six insurers, and only a shared database sees all six. Back in 2000, Coyne said adding public records to ISO ClaimSearch would "significantly reduce insurers' losses from fraudulent claims."
Other companies now plug into that pool to reach insurers. Simply Wall St reported on October 1, 2026, that the photo-checking firm Truepic has connected its image and video authentication tools directly to ClaimSearch.
The standard still has to earn its price
Investors are less sure than customers. Verisk shares were down about 32% over the twelve months to October 1, 2026, Simply Wall St noted, and the site's most-followed community estimate put fair value far below the share price, while its own cash-flow model put it far above.
Part of the worry sits in the smaller, pay-per-use side of the business. Fourth-quarter 2025 transactional revenue fell 6.5% on an organic basis, as a quiet weather year meant fewer property claims to estimate.
The subscription core kept growing through it. A pool like this pays for exactly as long as customers keep pouring their records in.
Start a small pool of your own
This works for a firm with 20 customers as well as one with 2,000.
- Open the last month of orders and support tickets and note every number customers fill in for you. You're looking for one that at least 20 customers send in the same format.
- Strip out the names and average that number by customer size or region, which takes an afternoon in a spreadsheet. Show it to a customer, and if they ask where they rank, you've built something they want.
- Then make the trade that built ISO. Email ten customers and offer the benchmark free if they send you the same number next quarter, and five yeses means your pool has started filling itself.
- Last, take the contract or form you send most often and post it as your standard, with a version number. When a new customer sends you work already laid out in your format, you've become the default.
The insurers of 1971 wanted cheaper paperwork, and they ended up creating a company that bills them every year. Somewhere in your inbox sits the spreadsheet that starts your version.
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