Arbol appoints Atzberger as Chief Scientist to lead new Innovation Unit

Arbol, the technology-led underwriter of parametric risk transfer, climate, and weather re/insurance business, has announced that it has launched an Innovation Unit, which is set to be led by Dr. Clement Atzberger, who has been appointed to the role of Chief Scientist.

The new unit will lead the development of foundational modeling, data and underwriting research. This work will serve as a foundational intelligence layer beneath Arbol’s specialty risk products while expanding the range of risks the company prices and writes.

As mentioned, the unit will be led by Atzberger, a remote sensing scientist, who will support underwriting across Arbol’s specialty lines, including agriculture, energy, wildfire and flood, helping to close protection gaps for difficult to price risks.

With a particular focus on agriculture initially, Atzberger will also drive advanced modeling that can support increased weather and yield protection products that cover gaps that standard insurance policies leave open, or where organisations currently face hurdles around claims settlement processes.

Moreover, Arbol builds catastrophe models and prices fourteen perils on models developed in-house, unlike most insurers who continue to price cat risk on models licensed from third-party vendors. Its primary perils include yield, flood, and wildfire, calibrated against years of live underwriting outcomes.

Through its new Innovation Unit, Arbol explained that it connects these models with the data pipelines that maintain model accuracy, and the underwriting research that connects model outputs directly into pricing and contract terms.

Overall, Atzberger brings over three decades of experience leading research initiatives.

As part of a team of scientists, Atzberger was instrumental in producing TESSERA, a data model that converts raw radar and optical satellite time series into AI-ready representations of the status of a land surface.

“This data can be used to show how land changes over time at 10-meter resolution globally, and enables insurers to understand and price climate risk with greater clarity, as well as provides critical data for climate researchers, farmers, carbon and restoration projects, and developers to turn specialized, resource-intensive processes into easily accessible data and information,” Arbol explained.

“In academia, you are usually done with a model once it is accurate enough to publish. Insurance demands more, because someone has to be willing to pay a claim on what the data says, and that is a big part of why I came here. Many of the risks Arbol writes are ones other carriers decline because the data they have was never good enough to price on. The work of our unit is to keep improving the models and the data behind underwriting decisions, so that more of what gets declined today becomes something we can write,” Atzberger commented.

“Foundation models are becoming widely available, and we were glad to help make TESSERA one of them. With our team of leading quants, scientists and engineers, led by Dr. Atzberger, we are able to calibrate models against real underwriting outcomes, closing critical coverage gaps and pricing climate risk with greater accuracy and efficiency than before,” Sid Jha, founder and CEO of Arbol said.