Verisk Analytics, Inc. VRSK Moat

Key data

The moat

An insurer setting a price for a homeowner's policy needs to know what claims cost. No single insurer sees enough claims to know. Verisk is the statistical agent: it collects loss and premium data from the whole industry, computes the loss costs, and files them with state regulators on the industry's behalf. Insurers then write policies off forms Verisk drafted using rates Verisk calculated.

That is two moats at once. The data pool cannot be replicated because it requires the participation of the companies it competes with, and the statistical agent role is a licensed position within state insurance regulation. An insurer leaving would have to build its own actuarial filings and defend them to fifty regulators.

What it produces is subscription revenue at 83% of the total, growing without a salesperson because the alternative is doing your own regulatory filings.

Widening or narrowing

The growth rate fell for a year and then turned.

The trough is the March 2026 quarter and the company had told holders to expect the sequential reacceleration that followed. Claims is the volatile half, having nearly flatlined at 0.5% in December before recovering to 6.1%. Underwriting, the larger and more regulated half, held between 5.3% and 7.7% throughout.

Subscription revenue rose from 81% of the total to 83% over four years, which is the mix moving toward the durable side.

The overrated case. Mid-single-digit organic growth is what this is, and it has been for a while. A moat this structurally protected should compound faster than the premiums it prices, and it does not. The reacceleration from 4.7% to 5.8% is one quarter and the company flagged it in advance, which makes it guidance met rather than a trend established.

On profit pool, Verisk takes a small fee per policy from an industry writing hundreds of billions of premium. Very thin, entirely uncontested at the point of use, and structurally protected by a 1995 antitrust settlement that still constrains how insurers may involve themselves in its governance.

The moat is stable.