Reactions North America Awards: We’re in Good Company

On Thursday, September 26, a contingent from RMS attended the Reactions’ 2019 North America (Re)Insurance Conference and Awards in New York. It was such an enjoyable event and it was a great honor to receive the North America Risk Modeler of the Year award. To win a Reactions award, you not only needed to impress the panel of independent judges, you also need market approval. Thank you to the judges and to everyone who took the time to support us.

Alongside us were many of our clients and partners who were either award nominees or winners on that night, including North America Insurer, Specialty Reinsurer, ILS Investment Manager, and Consultancy of the Year. Congratulations to our clients gaining recognition for great work. We are proud to be in such good company!

Get Fit for the Future

A key theme for this year’s Reactions event was “Future-proofing Your Business,” with a panel discussion on this topic moderated by David Brown, senior partner, regional insurance leader at EY. David was joined on the panel by: Jean-Paul Conoscente, president and CEO of SCOR Global P&C; Peter Wilson, CEO – Insurance, AXIS Capital; and Michael Millette, managing partner at Hudson Structured Capital Management.

This panel offered a deep dive into forward-looking best practices from leaders in the insurance industry and shared how they are safeguarding their positions in an ever-evolving market. They understand that the industry is continuing to evolve, largely driven by new and emerging risks. But they admitted that it is still slow to change, and stressed the need to innovate over time, and take advantage of the new tools that are set to change the way business is done.

First on the “to-do” list: the panel stated that businesses still need to become much more agile and efficient. New entrants by default will have low costs and new, efficient processes. Making a business more efficient and agile will help when facing both the anticipated (and unanticipated) competitive moves from businesses armed with innovative technologies, some of which will demand a total reevaluation of existing business models.

New entrants will also use differentiation, tied to a deeper understanding of customers – and businesses need to use analytics to drive the required customer insight. But many insurers are not investing enough, having to balance today’s operational costs with the resources they need to innovate differently moving forward.

Moving Forward with a New Open Data Standard

Also at the conference, Ryan Ogaard, senior vice president for RMS, gave a presentation on the Risk Data Open Standard (RDOS), a new, open data standard set to be released early in 2020. Ryan outlined the limitations of current schemas designed decades ago, and although they are still venerable workhorses, they are now out of date. Current schemas are just not designed to accommodate new perils, increased data sets, and complex financial structures.  

A flexible, modern data schema, the RDOS is set to drive value innovation through many parts of the industry. Designed to hold information on risk, including exposure, coverage, model settings, domain data, and analysis results, the RDOS is an extensible, flexible, and future-proof asset within modeling and analysis systems, and as an information interchange vehicle.

Ryan stressed the fact that the RDOS is an open standard, which gives the market the code, tooling, and documentation to leverage this technology in their organizations, and to also use the RDOS to contribute and innovate, to drive towards the industry goals of increasing efficiency and agility.

This was a very insightful conference, made even better not just by our award, but the fact we were in such good company, with our clients also receiving well deserved recognition for their work.