Lloyd’s managing agents should take full advantage of Oasis, the open source catastrophe modeling platform, in order to get wider views on catastrophe risks, urged Tom Bolt, Lloyd’s director of performance management.
“Catastrophe models are valuable tools, but each model expresses a limited number of views out of many possibilities,” said Bolt. “Increasing the number of models strengthens the market’s resilience and can allow more regions to be covered. The Oasis open source platform has the potential to create a broader marketplace for models.”
Bolt is soon to leave his role at Lloyd’s to become president, UK and Southern Europe for Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance’s new European unit, effective in June.
He is taking this opportunity before his departure to express concern about the industry’s need to take a wider view on catastrophe risk and the fact that the Oasis platform is available, said an Oasis representative.
Oasis is a not for profit, industry-owned plug and play catastrophe modeling platform. Described as an “app store” for cat models, London-based Oasis launched two years ago with support from most major managing agents and brokers.
The next release of Oasis – in May – is designed to strengthen the functionality and robustness of its complex software, said Oasis in a statement.
Oasis has commitments for more than 70 new models from 12 independent model providers in 2016, which include 27 flood models on national, continental or river basis, plus 18 for earthquake, 16 for hail, nine for storm and two terrorism models.
They cover many parts of the world, including several countries and perils for which there has been little model coverage available, Oasis said.
Supporters of Oasis include leaders in catastrophe reinsurance.
“Implementing Oasis forms an important part of SCOR’s global risk modelling strategy, and our plans to build a production environment to run Oasis models in-house are advanced,” said Paul Nunn, head of Natural Catastrophe Risk Modeling at SCOR Global P&C. (Nunn is an Oasis director).
“As well as commissioning a completely new model to be built in Oasis format, we have been encouraging our specialist model suppliers to repackage their models for us to use in our Oasis environment,” he said. “By reducing barriers to entry, Oasis is opening up the cat modeling market – both to new suppliers and new paying-customers.”
“RenaissanceRe supports Oasis as an important open source platform making the understanding of natural hazards risks available to more communities,” said Ian Branagan, group chief risk officer, RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd.
“The transparency of the platform can help advance the development of consistent and robust catastrophe risk models and facilitate more coherent communication about risk. These have the potential to assist with bridging the protection gap between the global demand for insurance and the supply of risk capital to meet that demand,” Branagan added.
Simon Blaquière, reinsurance actuarial manager, AXA Global P&C, commented: “We have been using Oasis software for nearly a year for our internal natural catastrophe models development and find it a very fast and practical solution. We support these developments and are waiting for more”.
Oasis software itself is free and supported by the industry via a membership fee. Models in Oasis have licenses as normal. However, almost all the model providers using Oasis will give substantial discounts for shared service purchase.
According to Dickie Whitaker, CEO of Oasis, this structure helps reduce the cost of popular models, such as U.S. windstorm, by over 50 percent, compared to some proprietary models in use in the market.
During 2015, the Oasis team added two new system components, a multi-process execution kernel and a front end for managing exposures and retrieving the results of an analysis. “Oasis is now a complete platform for catastrophe modelling and not just a framework,” said Whitaker.
Source: Oasis
Related:
Oasis’ ‘Open Source’ Cat Model – a User Friendly Game Changer?
Topics Catastrophe Excess Surplus Lloyd's
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