Artemis Live: Interview with RMS’ Jin Shah & Jeff Waters

This week our new video interview features RMS’ Jin Shah and Jeff Waters, who joined us to discuss the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season and how technology and analytics can help insurance, reinsurance and ILS market participants be better prepared and respond as storms threaten.

All of our Artemis Live video interviews can be accessed directly from our YouTube Channel and we have more interesting discussions with leaders of the ILS and reinsurance industry to come over the next few weeks.

With hurricane season now officially underway we spoke with Jin Shah, Director, Capital Markets & Resilience and Jeff Waters, Senior Product Manager both of catastrophe risk modelling specialist RMS.

The pair discussed the forecast outlook for the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season and the tools that RMS offers to help companies in the re/insurance and ILS market better understand their exposures.

Encouragingly, the ILS market is “making a real investment in the analytical processes and workflows that will result in an underwriting process that hopefully mitigates against surprise results,” Jin Shah explained.

We discussed the potential impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on catastrophe response and claims assessment, as well as how the pandemic lockdown and parking of assets has changed the exposure of the industry to a degree.

Waters highlighted that, “Our models do have a lot of flexibility for our users to conduct sensitivity tests and essentially generate their own view of risk for situations like this.”

Shah discussed the RMS products that help ILS funds and insurance-linked investors to better understand the threats posed to their portfolios when a hurricane is heading for land.

“This year we’re extending the insights and now we’ve got this notion of a conditional probability of attachment, based on a given level of industry loss,” he told us.

This will help ILS investors analyse what specific storm impacts could mean for their catastrophe bond profiles, Shah further explained.

Shah also told us that RMS’ tools can show revised probability of attachments for different ILS assets based on given industry loss scenarios.

RMS will also deliver its daily event selection as a risk profile through RMS’ Miu platform, which will allow ILS fund managers to analyse their private transactions as well, not just cat bonds, so they can provide better insights to their investor customers.

The full video interview is embedded below and can also be viewed in full, along with previous Artemis Live video interviews, over on our YouTube channel.

You can also listen in audio to these interviews by subscribing to the Artemis Live podcast here.

We will continue to bring you these interviews with leaders of the ILS and reinsurance industry on an ad-hoc basis, as and when our time and that of our contacts allow.

All of our Artemis Live video interviews have a focus on reinsurance, ILS and the efficiency of risk transfer and can be accessed directly from our YouTube Channel.

You can also listen in audio to these interviews by subscribing to the Artemis Live podcast here.

We’re offering sponsorship opportunities for our broadcasts, including pre-roll adverts or simply sponsor the entire series, as well as facilitating one-off sponsored webinars and virtual events including roundtables, to help companies access our market-leading audience. Please get in touch to discuss.