Insurwave bringing parametric triggers to complex commercial lines

Commercial lines focused insurtech platform provider Insurwave has raised £5 million of additional funding to drive further growth and help it expand service offerings for parametric trigger design more broadly into complex commercial insurance and perhaps reinsurance lines.

Insurwave is a platform for the insurance ecosystem and among the offerings it has for carriers is an ability to transform complex insurance processes to a digital-first experience, including design and also automation of parametric insurance contracts.

Through the integration of sources of internal and external data, alongside automated calculations of premiums, as well as risk performance ledger tasks, Insurwave wants to make the design of new products for complex insurance risks in the commercial lines sector more simple.

Chief Executive Officer David Power joined the company under a year ago and in this time has helped to drive the re-architecture of Insurwave to a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, enabling it to be much quicker to market itself, but also to offer its clients much faster speed to market.

The companies marine risk and blockchain based solution is already in use in the insurance market, but Insurwave has ambitions to apply its data first and contract encoding approach to other classes of complex risk as well.

Power commented, “We are delighted by the industry’s response to Insurwave, as we continue to onboard clients across risk owners, brokers, insurers and reinsurers. We are mission-centric in our approach to provide a digital-first platform for complex insurance that can benefit the sector at large.

“Our latest funding round comes at a key moment for the commercial insurance sector. More than ever, asset owners require access to capacity and progressive risk solutions to address their complex risk needs.

“Simultaneously, insurers, reinsurers and brokers are embracing technology that can complement and future proof their offerings. Our platform has a role to play in supporting insurance clients and insurance providers so that they can navigate the complexity and create digital insurance journeys for complex insurance.”

Using the data available from a wide array of sources, Insurwave’s platform can help carriers to create parametric risk transfer products, while Insurwave can also automate their adminsistration and management.

Speaking with Artemis, Power explained, “Based on its roots in the marine sector, Insurwave has captured the parameters of insurance in code where possible. War zones are a great example of this in marine.

“The contract has defined boundaries captured in code on Insurwave and the system tracks, notifies and generates endorsements if these conditions are breached. The geospatial tracking is a dynamic example of parameterised insurance in action, but similarly the system has the ability to assign claims based on the codified underwriting rules.

“We believe the traditional cat-in-a-box parametric model can be fine-grained, and we see this feature being further extended for assignment to ceded reinsurance treaties and inuring rules, as the building blocks are the same across these problem types.”

For innovation focused carriers, be they insurance or reinsurance, as well perhaps as ILS funds, the ability to take a date first approach to designing new parametric risk transfer products could be attractive.

While this approach could also suit existing parametric underwriters that are looking to make their more standardised products, such as wind related triggers, more commoditised and simple to replicate for different clients.