UNC to launch Institute for Risk Management and Insurance Innovation with industry backing

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) has given the green light for a new Institute for Risk Management and Insurance Innovation (IRMII), which has already secured millions of dollars in annual industry support and aims to nurture talent and bring novel solutions to the sector, The Insurer can reveal.

Fundraising for the initiative has been led by UNC alumnus and Insurance Advisory Partners co-founding managing partner Tony Ursano, who initiated the idea, with IRMII also receiving a “generous” contribution of internal funds from UNC as a result of strong support from the university’s board of trustees and its chairman, John Preyer.

Although details of the fundraising could not be confirmed, industry contributions are understood to have come in the form of three-year commitments from a host of carriers, brokers, private equity funds and other insurance sector participants.

IRMII will be led by director Dr Greg Characklis, W R Kenan Jr Distinguished Professor in UNC’s Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering and founding director of the Center on Financial Risk in Environmental Systems (CoFiRES) which will serve as a platform to facilitate IRMII’s rapid development.

Founded in 2017, CoFiRES is a research centre focused on quantifying the financial risks of many natural hazards such as floods, droughts, wind, extreme temperatures and infectious disease outbreaks, and on developing innovative insurance products for managing these risks more cost-effectively.

With its existing group of talented staff and students, a steady stream of external research funding, and relationships both inside and outside of the industry, CoFiRES will be absorbed into IRMII in a move aimed at accelerating the expansion of the new institute in terms of both its size and its move into considering a broader set of risks including wildfires, cybersecurity, and eventually health and life insurance.

Speaking to this publication, Characklis said there are two primary goals for IRMII.

“First, the new institute will be an innovative research hub providing interdisciplinary training to doctoral and master’s students focused on insurance industry challenges. Second, we’ll have an undergraduate certificate program in risk management that will be designed with industry input and which will prepare students to productively enter the insurance industry workforce on day one,” he explained.

“The critical point here is that IRMII is being designed around strong engagement with industry, and its success will hinge on close interactions with our industry partners,” Characklis continued.

Solutions-driven interdisciplinary approach

The program aims to attract talent by offering a more solutions-driven and interdisciplinary approach to training students than some of the more traditional programs currently available.

The program will also rely heavily on the use of technology and data science to assess and analyse risk. The primary goal of IRMII is providing the industry with access to the “best and brightest young people” by creating a pipeline of students educated in many different facets of risk management and insurance.

This multidisciplinary approach will be enhanced by drawing students from a range of backgrounds, including engineering, economics, natural sciences and business.

An Industry Advisory Board, which will be chaired by Ursano, is being formed to provide input on the design of IRMII’s research and training program.

It will offer executives opportunities to interact with students through guest lectures and seminars, as well as a summer industry internship program which will be designed to provide students with exposure to a commercial perspective on managing risk.

The institute will also host an annual event that brings together industry professionals with researchers to facilitate greater understanding of emerging risks and the potential of novel risk transfer products.

Noble industry

Ursano highlighted the challenges around talent the industry faces, as well as its public image.

“As an industry we need to do a better job of promoting the value the industry provides, as well as marketing more effectively the fulfilling careers that it has to offer. Through its research and training program, IRMII will provide a venue to tell the story of why insurance is a purposeful industry, which I feel is completely missed.

“It’s a noble industry that provides resilience, and at UNC we have the resources and student base to produce a talented group of young people ready to go into the industry and become our leaders of the future,” he said.

The insurance industry-focused investment banker also highlighted the potential commercial application of research to create real solutions to risks that are impacting the wider economy.

“We want to build a training ground for people to use cutting-edge data science and advanced computational techniques to identify, price, and hedge risk, and then create new solutions for managing it,” he continued.

Preyer said the initiative has gained strong support from the UNC board of trustees.

“They love this because it provides a new way to get students engaged in solving some of society’s biggest financial challenges. There are great synergies between the industry’s need to grow its talent pool, and the university’s desire to create a cadre of highly trained students – not just the master’s and PhDs, but eventually a significant number of undergraduates. Taken together this is something that is transformative both for the university and the industry,” he said.