Tremor hires world-leading market design experts

Tremor Technologies, Inc., the programmatic reinsurance risk placement marketplace provider, has announced the hiring of a team consisting of some of the world’s leading market design experts.

Insurance technology (InsurTech) start-up Tremor has an open, technology-driven, programmatic marketplace for reinsurance risk placement that is gaining traction, with a number of catastrophe reinsurance programs already placed using it and more placements understood to be on the way.

As a start-up targeting the placement or trading of insurance and reinsurance risks Tremor has created its own software platform, seeking to develop an edge through the provision of advanced marketplace functionality to its users, all designed to enhance the efficiency of transferring and transacting in risk.

The company has now announced a number of new hires it has made in recent months as it builds out its marketplace design team and expertise.

The hires come from backgrounds that have seen them work with governments, corporations and industry groups, where they have advised and worked on projects to design better functioning marketplaces.

Sean Bourgeois, CEO of Tremor, commented, “Our mission is to build the world’s leading programmatic risk marketplace and we know that achieving our goal requires the world’s leading market designers.

“The Tremor team have dramatically improved how advertising, U.S. treasury, electricity, gas and spectrum markets trade with sophisticated application of auction technology and optimization mathematics. A complex matching engine for the risk industry is not something that you can lease, you need to build it yourself and this is highly complex and highly specialized endeavor that takes years to do properly.”

Peter Cramton is Tremor’s Chief Economist as well as a Professor of Economics at the University of Cologne. Cramton has been conducting research on auction theory and practice since 1983, with a focus on the design of auctions for applications such as spectrum auctions, electricity auctions, and treasury auctions. His work has been published widely in economic journals.

Al Roth is a Nobel prize winner and also the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University, as well as the George Gund Professor Emeritus of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard. Roth shared the 2012 Nobel memorial prize in Economics, ‘for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.’ His work is focused on game theory, experimental economics, and market design.

Constantinos Daskalakis is the X-Window Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and an affiliate of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC). He has also been a postdoctoral researcher for Microsoft Research in New England, and has been at the faculty of MIT since 2009.

Dirk Bergemann is the Douglass and Marion Campbell Professor of Economics at Yale University and has been Chair of the universities Department of Economics since 2013. In addition, Bergemann has secondary appointments as Professor of Computer Science at the School of Engineering and Professor of Finance at the School of Management. He’s also a Co-Editor of Econometrica, a popular peer-reviewed academic journal of economics with a focus on econometrics.

Jakub Kastl is Professor of Economics at Princeton University and his research specialises in the field of industrial organisation, especially in financial markets, auctions, and market design. Kastle has deep expertise for auctions in the financial sector and also linked to monetary policy, most recently working on projects related to treasury auctions, spectrum auctions, as well as providing consultancy to various central banks.

Sven Seuken is an Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics of the University of Zurich and head of the Computation and Economics Research Group. His research focus lies at the intersection of Computer Science and Microeconomics / Game Theory, with particular expertise in the design and analysis of electronic markets and market-based systems.

Finally, Ben Lubin who after finishing a degree in computer science in 1999 joined BBN Technologies, the research and development firm where the first internet routers were developed, His work was focused on advanced multi-agent modeling, scheduling and logistics systems. After six years in industry, he returned to the academic world, concentrating on the intersection of computer science, game theory and economics. He is now a clinical associate professor in the information systems department of the Boston University Questrom School of Business.

This heavyweight line-up bring significant expertise that has all been focused on ensuring markets work in the most efficient, transparent and effective manner possible.

In the insurance, reinsurance, ILS and risk related markets this is going to be absolutely key, as technology that just seeks to shift transactions onto a market or platform, without offering evident capital and operational efficiency gains to users, is not likely to gain traction.

The focus of start-ups in the risk placement and trading space has to be on delivering optimal execution of trades and risk placement, hence providing benefits to all-sides in this market, as well as to the all-important intermediaries that choose to use their platforms to enhance their own clients capital efficiency.

By employing some of the best in the world to lead on the design and ongoing development of its marketplace, Tremor is looking to bring as much efficiency as possible to the market through its platform.

“We are thrilled to have such a world-renowned team at the heart of the company helping us to achieve our mission,” Bourgeois commented.

Tremor recently announced the successful pricing and placing of two layers of insurance giant Markel Corporation’s property catastrophe excess of loss reinsurance tower.

The firm completed its first auction of a property catastrophe reinsurance program last December.

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