View this article online: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2021/03/08/604322.htm
Swiss Re has entered into a strategic partnership with ICEYE, a commercial satellite operator and satellite-based flood monitoring provider.
Building on ICEYE’s innovative technology, the partnership will advance flood risk management, assist disaster response and speed up claims’ payments globally – thereby addressing insurers’ pain points, said Swiss Re.
The partnership will advance Swiss Re’s natural-catastrophe services by enabling early warning systems and near real-time flood monitoring built on ICEYE’s flood monitoring capabilities with radar satellite imaging.
ICEYE’s unique radar satellite constellation, high resolution imaging capabilities, and rapid response analysis fuels ICEYE’s monitoring solution, which offers global coverage for Swiss Re to track and react faster to floods around the globe.
The strategic partnership will initially focus on floods but is intended to expand to other perils, such as wildfires, wind and earthquake damage.
Flooding has been consistently one of the globe’s most recurrent and costly natural catastrophes, said Swiss Re. Indeed, modeling floods has proven particularly challenging in locations with fine-scale changes in elevation, complex terrains and man-made structures as is typical for dense urban centers.
The partnership aims to address those areas where most of flood modeling today falls short, said the reinsurer.
Swiss Re will gain access to ICEYE’s data on flood events on a global basis, high accuracy observation-based flood maps, snapshots of the developments of individual floods, and water depth estimations within 24 hours for these events. Swiss Re will make footprint assessments of the events available on CatNet® Premium – its proprietary geo risk platform – thereby enabling faster loss assessment and payouts for clients.
Pranav Pasricha, Swiss Re’s global head of P&C Solutions, said: “We’re very pleased to announce the strategic partnership with ICEYE. By combining Swiss Re’s risk knowledge with ICEYE’s data, we will be able to further expand our capabilities in geo and remote sensing. The partnership will enable us to develop solutions, advance our services to the benefit of our clients and enable faster claims payouts. We see this as an important commitment for a serious natural catastrophe threat and think it could become a real game changer.”
“Swiss Re has challenged ICEYE to create a transformative flood monitoring capability for the insurance industry, and they have helped us create it. We look forward to partnering with Swiss Re to give Swiss Re and their clients a competitive advantage in the market,” commented Charles Blanchet, vice president Solutions, ICEYE, which is headquartered in Espoo, Finland.
Source: Swiss Re
Top photograph: An artist’s depiction of an ICEYE SAR microsatellite, credited to ICEYE.