RMS: Providing a global view of risk
Moe Khosravy, executive vice president of software at RMS, explains how the Covid-19 pandemic will influence the insurance sector – and why climate risk will be a major area of focus
What technology trends do you expect to shape the insurance sector over the next two years?
I believe Covid-19 was an aha moment for the insurance industry demonstrating how critical cloud computing is for business continuity and shared workflows, especially as people continue to work from home. But when I say cloud, I'm really referring to the transformative change that comes when software as a service (SaaS) is adopted.
Over the past few months, organisations who relied on SaaS offerings were instantly productive thanks to the ease of access. Cloud has obviously been here for a while, but overnight, industries were forced to accelerate its adoption. The demand is increasing for SaaS architectures to support internal projects, as well as in solutions purchased from vendors.
When we built RMS Risk Intelligence™ (RI), SaaS was a core guiding tenet. We made sure everything can automatically be scaled up and down, there would be zero downtime in updates and that the service is available with mission critical service level agreements for the platform and IQ applications built on top of it.
Building on top of that fabric of elastic compute and storage, you can easily bring in technologies like advanced analytics, machine learning and AI for everything from insights to personalisation, data augmentation and anomaly detections.
How do you expect insurance risk modelling to change post-Covid-19?
Post-Covid-19, more companies will be interested in understanding the risks they're not expecting. They'll want to learn how cloud technology can shape their operations and take advantage of disparate data within different systems.
Our insurance clients are frequently wondering about their cyber risk, continuity and business interruption risk. And they're interested in the big picture of how everything is interconnected.
We're seeing more dynamic modelling start to emerge to better understand these risks. However, to be useful for the industry, these technologies need to both adhere to regulatory requirements and be flexible enough to accommodate new events and data sets.
Having a unified platform allows risk analytics to be taken to a different level, bringing systems together, and ensuring an open and modular approach to extensibility and to development.
What have been RMS's achievements over the past year?
A key major achievement was the delivery of an open and modular platform that unifies model execution and enables effortless scalability to power our IQ applications. We've been spending a lot of time on the user experience and the productivity of our new applications and I think it shows. User experience is important and can be a key differentiator as it dramatically boosts productivity. Applications such as Risk Modeler, ExposureIQ, and SiteIQ are already showcasing some of the new design system thinking.
We are very proud of the HD models we're releasing as well, which are powered by the new platform. They're the next-gen version of our existing models and bring differentiated intellectual property and sophistication in methodology. Take for example a portfolio where locations next to each other could have wildly different risk profiles. Granularity in the modelling and high computing power are necessary to assess the risks and their interconnectivity to other risks.
What will RMS focus on over the next year?
Two areas are top of mind when it comes to our focus over the next year. Covid-19 was a wake-up call to the various types of risk that can correlate across an ecosystem. It validated our focus on continuing to support the industry's understanding of the complexities behind emerging perils like climate, cyber and other risks.
We see technology as a core enabler in supporting an industry challenged with an explosion of data. There is great need for better data quality and data augmentation to improve how we identify small risks that can become large and complicated risks.
A platform becomes powerful when it's not limited by your imagination. We will continue to enhance Risk Intelligence as new risks emerge. Over the next year, we're adding more HD Models and purpose-built IQ applications.
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