Overview
National Flood Experts (NFE) is a civil engineering and consulting firm operating at the intersection of flood regulation, insurance, and mitigation. As Risk Rating 2.0 reshaped how NFIP premiums are calculated, NFE saw an urgent need for a more transparent way to connect flood hazard, NFIP rating logic, and real-world mitigation outcomes. This search ultimately led to a strategic partnership with KatRisk, whose flood model and data products now power key components of NFE’s decision-support platform, Flocom.
The Challenge
Risk Rating 2.0 introduced a more complex rating methodology, making it difficult for consultants, engineers, and communities to understand or replicate NFIP-style premiums. NFE needed:
- A reliable, production-grade hazard and risk dataset
- A way to represent NFIP rating drivers in a transparent, technically credible manner
- Inputs that would support both property-specific consulting and community-level planning
KatRisk’s flood hazard model and proprietary data, specifically detailed fluvial and coastal flood characteristics, derived from KatRisk’s high-resolution flood modeling capabilities within SpatialKat (the same variable used within FEMA’s RR2.0 underwriting), provided the missing piece.
Why NFE Chose KatRisk
NFE selected KatRisk for both technical performance and partnership fit, citing:
- High-quality, consistent flood hazard and risk data
- Flexible APIs that integrate well into Flocom’s architecture
- A collaborative team willing to engage deeply with NFIP, mitigation, and engineering use cases
- Responsiveness and support that NFE described as “critical” for real-time consulting workflows
This made KatRisk the right choice to underpin NFE’s growing suite of NFIP-centric tools.
How KatRisk Powers the Flocom Engine
KatRisk’s model outputs form the technical foundation of several of Flocom’s most important capabilities, enabling:
1. Property-Level NFIP Premium Estimation
Flocom can closely replicate NFIP-style premiums using KatRisk-driven inputs, allowing users to understand how risk factors influence the final premium.
2. Mitigation and Scenario Testing
Engineers can model the premium impact of floodproofing, elevation, drainage improvements, levee upgrades, and other interventions—turning mitigation into measurable financial outcomes.
3. Portfolio & Community Insights
Lenders, investors, and public agencies can aggregate property-level risk into neighborhood, municipal, or portfolio-scale views that support budgeting, planning, and policy discussions.
4. Streamlined Consulting Workflows
What once required manual calculations is now consistent, automated, and quality-controlled inside Flocom. This improves turnaround times, allows deeper client analysis, and scales NFE’s consulting practice.
Results
NFE describes KatRisk’s contribution as “a backbone” that turns Flocom into a decision-grade platform rather than a simple visualization tool. KatRisk amplifies the impact of NFE’s engineering and consulting expertise, helping both organizations push the flood marketplace toward greater transparency, consistency, and resilience.
NFE reports several meaningful improvements since integrating KatRisk:
- Exceptional rating performance: Flocom maintains a very low estimation error when complete data is available, critical for client trust and internal confidence.
- More actionable mitigation guidance: NFE can quantify how engineering interventions affect both risk and NFIP-style premiums.
- Better portfolio decision-making: Clients can connect long-term insurance behavior with capital planning and resilience goals.
- Higher efficiency and consistency: Complex questions that once required bespoke analysis can now be answered quickly and transparently.
These advances support NFE’s goal of bringing best-in-class flood data and consulting insights to the moments where decisions are made, during transactions, underwriting, portfolio reviews, and community mitigation planning.
Looking Ahead
NFE and KatRisk are aligned around a shared mission: closing the flood insurance gap by making high-quality hazard data and NFIP-aligned analytics accessible to communities, lenders, and property owners. Both teams see significant opportunity to continue expanding the integration of modeling, mitigation, and real-world decision support.
