A Platform Harnessing other Insurtechs to Improve Natural Catastrophe Analytics
After earning a PhD in earthquake engineering, Deepak Badoni, co-founder and president of EigenRisk, ended up working for Aon Impact Forecasting.
“I just fell in love with this whole idea of solving a really practical problem of trying to quantify the cost of natural catastrophes in the insurance context — and didn’t even realize that all these million-dollar decisions were getting based on models,” Badoni said.
He realized that “everybody runs models in the industry, but very few people actually understand the results of these very complex models.”
“In a lot of cases, there’s a lot of garbage in, garbage out modelling that goes on. So people are making decisions [based on the models] but very few understand the basis for that.”
Badoni saw the potential to launch a platform that bring together data from multiple sources.
“It’s a very fragmented industry. There’s a lot of small players out there, like us, and we can join forces,” he said.
EigenRisk, a natural catastrophe modeling platform, was launched eight years ago.
“The vision is to be the one-stop shop for all analytics related to natural catastrophes,” Badoni said.
The company’s cloud-based platform provides one-stop access to data management, geo-visualization, analytics, reporting, modeling and alerts. These capabilities are integrated with hazard data, event projections and simulations curated from more than 30 leading public and private sources to provide a more dynamic and complete perspective of risk.
Recent data sources added to EigenRisk’s platform include ICEYE’s unique flood insights for large-scale flood events; Canopy Weather’s U.S. severe convective storm response capabilities; and Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation — an international public-private partnership committed to the development of open-source hazard and risk assessment software, tools and data – is sharing its earthquake exposure modeling resources.
“It’s really important to understand what your exposures are. What is your data? If you have the wrong values, if you have the wrong locations, a cat model isn’t going to help you,” Badoni said. “For instance, if you try to run a traditional cat model on a single tornado, it’s not going to give you an accurate answer because they’re designed to work in the aggregate, on very large catastrophes.”
EigenRisk has built a platform around the completeness of the data before cat modeling is involved, and includes climate change risks such as heat stress.
“Heat stress is the idea that if temperatures are going up for increasingly long stretches of time, it’s going to have an impact on crops or if your business needs water. Heat stress on its own could cause economic losses for people, insurers are starting to look at that,” Badoni said.
The platform can be used for more than insurance, he said, noting risk managers are interested in better understanding their risk.
“I’d say we can answer 80% of the questions you might have right before, during or after a large catastrophe event,” he said.
The company is broadening its scope beyond natural catastrophes to include manmade ones, such as explosions.
“We think the gap is really about how can you visualize and even simplify things down to the essence and communicate it to non-technical people,” he said.
Contact Us
Learn more about our catastrophe risk management platform – EigenRisk:
