A tight hold on tech

New technology, improved analytics and refined approaches are creating greater transparency between trading partners, says TigerRisk’s Neal McCullough.

Technology has always been an impactful force in our industry. The progression from early computers to today’s catastrophe models has been exponential, and technology’s role in risk management has never been more critical.

Sequestered as we are in our makeshift home offices, Covid-19 has only increased our dependence on technology. Over the past six months, an unexpected pandemic has profoundly changed the way we view and evaluate risk.

It wasn’t that long ago that evaluating reinsurance structures and pricing meant being buried in actuarial tables and catastrophe models that took hours, and sometimes even days, to run. Today, thanks to improved technology and analytics, we can ideate, iterate, and evaluate hundreds of options in mere minutes, generating an “optimized frontier” of solutions for our clients.

We began to see a shift in the evaluation of risk well before the current pandemic took hold. Client risk tolerances, program retentions and exhaustion points, and risk management needs have become highly dynamic and can literally change overnight. There is a growing need for risk management advisors who can respond quickly and competently.

Now, with a backdrop of looming Covid-19 losses, poor underwriting results, lackluster investment returns, and uncertainty around 2020 CAT losses, we need to continue leveraging and improving our analytical tools and capabilities.

”It wasn’t that long ago that evaluating reinsurance structures and pricing meant being buried in actuarial tables and catastrophe models that took hours and sometimes even days”

Fortunately, innovative technology is allowing our industry to evaluate risk better than ever before. Dramatic improvements in analytical tools have allowed reinsurance buyers and sellers to consider more options, more quickly, and with less strain on resources. This growing capability allows for expanded views of risk and facilitates arbitrage within capital and risk, thereby creating greatly improved solutions for all parties.

Much of this improved capability is the result of new tools; some of them custom-built, some modified existing tools, and some off-the-shelf commercial models. To make the most of these new and varied tools, we need platforms that can integrate results and that are agnostic to any particular vendor’s view of risk. TigerEye is TigerRisk’s internal & external reinsurance pricing and portfolio management software.

It is (external or third party) model agnostic and seamlessly facilitates data import from vendor models or nonmodeled losses from any actuarial distribution. The platform is flexible and can adjust data through modifying or blending loss frequency and severity (as well as other modifications), all while keeping an auditable trail of the how and why. TigerEye allows users to leverage the full power of models in order to gain a robust picture of underlying risk exposures and to create optimal risk-to-capital solutions. The platform can analyze treaties with complex structures, while simultaneously allowing users to view the marginal impact on a portfolio. Fully capturing underlying data provides greater control and accuracy throughout the pricing and portfolio management process.

Our clients appreciate the vast power and computational speed of TigerEye, which combined with a simple onsite IT footprint and industry leading user-interface, enable the democratization of risk-analytics across their organization. 

They also benefit from the ability to iterate and view multiple options in mere minutes as they work to find the best solutions. From actuary to underwriter, risk analyst to program manager, TigerEye facilitates a collaborative, hands-on, business-driven approach to risk assessment and portfolio management.