News

“It is becoming clear that, in this uncertain world, protecting the economic activity of customers is as important as protecting their assets and speed of payment is essential.”

Our Partnerships and Innovation Lead, Toby Behrmann, featured in Insurance Day this week. 

Toby gives an insight into the power of parametrics; outlining why 2020 created the perfect storm for extensive growth in these solutions. 

In December 2019, Hannover Re, KfW and our Natural Disaster Fund announced joint collaboration, with the aim to bring sustainable risk transfer solutions to low and middle income countries. 

One year on, our partnership has reached over 10 million beneficiaries, across 21 countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

At the Insuresilience Global Partnership Forum on Monday 7th December, we took a look back on our first year, exploring the importance of public private partnerships for implementing actionable programmes to combat the protection gap. 

Speakers included our founder Dan Bierenbaum, Principal Portfolio Manager Stefan Hirche of KfW and Hannover Re’s Managing Director Henning Ludolphs. 

Watch the event here: 

Global Parametrics (GP) has structured two risk transfer solutions using its new Water Balance Index (WBI), enabling partners IBISA and One Acre Fund to provide drought and excess rainfall protection in India and Tanzania. The WBI estimates changes to the proportion of water in soil, using monthly rainfall, evapotranspiration and other weather variables such as temperature and wind speed. WBI has uses worldwide: to hedge drought risks and reduce the negative impacts of water imbalance on crops, closely tied to water shortages, food insecurity and economic losses.

Global Parametrics was honoured to be featured in the IDF’s report “The Development Impact of Risk Analytics“. The IDF is a partnership led by the insurance industry and supported by the UN, World Bank, NGOs and other international organisations, calling for international collaboration to develop and share capabilities in disaster risk understanding where it is needed most. The report encompasses the contributions of over 30 industry professionals, across private sector, development agencies and specialists, academia and international NGOs.  

GP’s work delivering anticipatory cash transfers with Oxfam and Plan International for the B-READY programme in the Philippines was featured. B-READY harnesses digital cash transfer and forecast parametric index to trigger payments to vulnerable households prior to tropical cyclones making impact, strengthening the resilience of local communities.

Read the IDF report here: https://www.insdevforum.org/report-development-impact-risk-analytics

GP has structured a solution to provide windstorm protection on the world’s most remote habitable island. Our unique wind index will help safeguard Tristan da Cunha’s lobster factory which is responsible for 70% of the island’s income. This is indicative of our continued commitment to providing protection to businesses and communities in emerging markets.

GP are proud to welcome Obbe Tuinenburg PhD and Zoe Nolan to the team. Their arrival signifies our commitment to building platform independent standardised indices that can be used globally to understand climate and weather perils, and to deploy these at scale. Obbe holds a PhD in Land Atmosphere Interactions and Earth Systems Sciences from Wageningen University and Zoe’s diverse computer engineering background has seen her work within cloud services, microservices and blockchain development.

Co-founder Jerry Skees discusses how his development experience helped get Global Parametrics off the ground. In the interview with Eastern Standard’s Tom Martin, on WEKU, he touches on how his agricultural background led to opportunities traversing many corners of the world. This brought the “link between development, poverty and natural disasters into a much larger story for me to understand the economics of disasters and how it impacts the poor the most.”

Having a reliable way to understand the impact of an event, prior to it occurring, is a game changer for building resilience to extreme weather and natural disasters. In April’s The Actuary Magazine, Jerry Skees and Alin Radu discuss the value of Parametric Forecast Indices, and give an in-depth look at Global Parametrics’ B-Ready program, where we developed a disaster risk financing product with Oxfam and Plan International in the Philippines.

Our Head of Innovation, Toby Behrmann spoke at the European Microfinance week on a panel titled ‘climate disaster relief for sustainable resilience’. Along with other industry experts, Toby discussed how parametrics contribute to smart decisions around climate disasters, allowing programmes to anticipate needs before disaster strikes and act swiftly when support is needed most.