This article was produced in partnership with Swiss Re Corporate Solutions.
Desmond Devoy, of Insurance Business Canada, sat down with Allen Kwan, head of customer and distribution management, North America, at Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, to discuss its risk and data services platform, and how it can help your clients access the same, real-time data his company has at its fingertips.
Imagine a platform that could let your clients access insurance company warnings about, say, impending hurricanes, in real time, allowing them to batten down the hatches?
Swiss Re Corporate Solutions is celebrating the first anniversary of its Risk Data & Services (RDS) platform, which does just that, and puts a whole host of other data at the fingertips of your clients.
“Most of our core team are all insurance people that have spent their entire careers selling pieces of paper with promises,” said Allen Kwan (pictured), head of customer and distribution management, North America, at Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, during a recent interview. “If we provide our customers with our tools and our view of the world, it helps them figure out how their risk should look, it helps them understand what their insurance companies are looking for.”
In a tighter market like today’s, insurers are looking at terms and conditions, making it clearer what it will, and will not, cover.
So when customers are looking at what they are getting, and how things are changing, it is good for them to know what their exposure is.
The platform has been up and running for about a year now and Kwan has found the process “fascinating,” comparing his hypotheses from last year to what actually transpired.
“Our customers continue to surprise me, because they’re super intellectually curious,” he said. The platform “gives them the ability to completely whitespace a risk and take it into places that I don’t think we anticipated them taking that.”
The platform has three main focus areas – property management, a sustainability compass, and supply chain resilience.
These three areas are available a la carte, but even if only one area is utilized, the steps remain the same.
The customer creates a “digital twin” of sorts, of their company’s physical footprint. The twin captures company facilities and can also capture contract manufacturers or suppliers as well. This creates the base from which a client can then add one of the three modules, or all three.
Indeed, companies are already utilizing the data.
Many are already creating stress tests for their twins, under a number of different scenarios - from California earthquakes or Florida hurricanes, heat waves to cold snaps, to more off-kilter scenarios, about how their company would be affected with business interruption.
“You can really see how capacity for your product changes and what happens,” he said. “This has given people an ability to run natural catastrophe (scenarios) from their product view, and lets them get a sense as to what happens on a bad day.”
And clients need not worry about anyone spying on this information. The data is placed on the client’s secure enclave. Kwan said that it was important to give clients these tools and let them see the world the way Swiss Re does, in a secure space, so that they feel comfortable using it. And Swiss Re cannot see the information, unless the client gives them access.
“It’s completely decoupled as its own separate offering from our risk transfer,” Kwan said. “They’re welcome to share it with us if they’d like. They’re welcome to use it and develop their view of insurance and use it to pitch to their insurers, us included, or some of our competitors. So it really does let them use it as a free space with no hooks, to do whatever they want with it. And I think that’s very liberating.”
The information is put into the platform, as often as they deem necessary. Swiss Re updates its information input every time the model changes, like when new storm track modelling or earthquake modelling is updated.
A client can also upload their digital twin into the platform, to get alerts and let them know when, for example, a storm is headed in the company’s direction, giving them time to shut down production and take appropriate action in real time.
“We’re super excited about this product,” said Kwan. “This is the first time, I can think of, I’ve seen a company open up and give people access to the data that our own folks use. And I wish people would take advantage of it.”
To find out more about the RDS platform, please visit Swiss Re online at: https://corporatesolutions.swissre.com/insurance-solutions/risk-data-and-services.html
