Meteo Protect helps French farmers to parametric weather risk transfer

Weather risk management, risk transfer, pricing, data, broking and structuring firm, Meteo Protect’s weather insurance platform has been launched by the National Union of Potato Producers (UNPT) of France, providing farmers with resilience against climate and weather-related risks.

With the increasing realisation that climate change could be driving more frequent and more severe adverse weather events, farmers in all parts of the world are having to navigate unpredictable crop seasons, in terms of volume, quality and also price.

For potato producers in France the story is no different, and in an effort to minimise the impacts of unseasonal weather on potato crops across France, the UNTP has become the first French agricultural union to offer its members weather insurance.

The UNTP has launched Meteo Protects dedicated weather insurance platform, which utilises and index-based, or parametric trigger structure to ensure rapid payout post-event, with simpler, and automated indemnification that doesn’t require field loss assessment, deductible or adjustment.

Gabriel Gross, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Meteo protect, commented; “We are extremely pleased to partner with the UNTP to provide France’s potato farmers with a revolutionary solution to insure themselves from weather risk and thus to better protect their livelihoods.

“The needs and risks of the agricultural sector are evolving quickly, but so is the insurance industry. We are committed to ensuring that farmers can access the cover that they need through the ease of an online platform with the union they trust.”

The platform provides UNTP with a fully branded, online underwriting and pricing platform, which produces tailored insurance solutions for its farmers, against any weather or climate-related exposure.

The launch of Meteo Protect’s platform provides UNTP members with access to vital index-based weather insurance designed to protect against rising costs and lower revenues because of adverse, or unseasonal weather events impacting crop production.

Meteo Protect explains that UNTP members are able to select policy specifications, which includes crop, geolocation, coverage period, and also weather parameters, such as wind speed, or rainfall, for example. Once members have selected their policy needs the platform aggregates weather-related data, prices and then underwrites the insurance policy, in real-time.

The benefit of everything being online is that farmers can actually track their insurance contracts in real-time, therefore being able to know in real-time what the outcome of an event is to be.

The recent launch of Meteo Protect’s weather insurance platform by the UNTP is an area that is likely to be attractive to providers of alternative, or third-party reinsurance capital.

Insurance-linked securities (ILS) funds and capital markets investors are increasingly attracted to business outside of the highly competitive, and pressured pure catastrophe risk space, and weather risk is an area some ILS funds specialise in via collateralised reinsurance solutions designed to support weather risk brokers.

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