Tremor launches V2.0 marketplace with enhanced quoting, analytics, broker tools

Tremor Technologies, Inc., the programmatic insurance and reinsurance risk transfer marketplace provider, has launched a Version 2.0 of its technology, with enhanced and more sophisticated quoting features, new analytics and broker tools to help them manage client relationships.

Tremor is responding to the needs of cedents, reinsurance markets and brokers with its V2.0 release, adding sophisticated new features with which the company hopes to set its marketplace further ahead of others.

The November release sees the addition of new quoting tools to the Tremor software platform, with which cedents and reinsurers can be empowered to simply and precisely express their auction terms before bidding begins.

The V2.0 Tremor release also sees the launch of aggregate supply analytics reports, providing insight into individual transactions and the market at large, as well as a new broker portal to help them use Tremor’s independent marketplace on behalf of their clients while maintaining their all-important relationships.

Sean Bourgeois, CEO of Tremor explained, “We have been working hard in close partnership with insurers, reinsurers and brokers over the past several months – these are the features they wanted us to build and we are thrilled to deploy them ahead of schedule for the upcoming renewal season.

“We are really excited to launch these new features which add significantly more power and quoting flexibility to our marketplace, further separating Tremor from the competition.”

Budget quoting means that reinsurance cedents can specify a program budget with price guidance for each individual layer within it.

This new functionality means that Tremor can shift the cedent’s spend between layers as necessary, all the while guaranteeing that the budget is not exceeded. This means layers can be priced more precisely from reinsurer quotes and contracting friction can be reduced relative to a standard placement process.

The next new functionality in the V2.0 release of Tremor’s software platform involves aggregate supply analytics, which will now be reported to both cedents and reinsurers using the marketplace.

Aggregate supply – the total supply available in the market at thousands of different price points – gives cedents insight into how they can optimize their reinsurance structure and risk kept on the books, and gives all parties insight into the capacity available in the market.

Tremor noted that these analytics and the insights they can provide are “unprecedented in the market” and also unique to as only a third-party exchange with sealed bidding would be able to provide them.

This type of market intelligence could significantly benefit both buyers and sellers of reinsurance, or other large risk programs.

For reinsurance capital providers, quoting options just got a lot richer and more full-featured in the latest version of Tremor’s marketplace, as reinsurers will be able to tie program layers together.

They can now leverage Tremor’s standard quoting process and add “subjectivities”, or submit an “equal share” quote that guarantees an equal percentage of all layers of a non-proportional reinsurance program.

“Subjectivities” allow quoting reinsurance capital providers to specify that their total allocation is authorised subject to one layer representing a minimum (or maximum) fraction of the total, even after they have already expressed detailed supply curves and capacity limitations.

As a result, one layer of a program may subsidise another, allowing a reinsurer’s allocation to be maximised while ensuring that the aggregate price still meets its needs.

“Subjectivities give reinsurers the power to precisely manage the composition of their allocations. The guarantees Tremor’s platform is able to offer are unique — no other process today can guarantee that constraints like these will be satisfied for all participants simultaneously,” explained Chris Wilkens, Tremor’s Chief Product Officer.

It’s complex matching like this that helps to differentiate platforms like Tremor and brings true efficiencies to the placement of reinsurance programs, if these rich features are used.

Features like this also require a lot of heavy lifting in terms of programming, as they are not simple to produce in software terms and are also far ahead of the majority of off-the-shelf matching engines and auction software, which often tends to lag behind in terms of sophistication in a lot of areas related to bidding.

The alternative for users of Tremor’s marketplace will be to use “equal shares” quoting to tie layers together in their bidding, meaning all successful reinsurers participating in the bidding in this way will receive the same share of each layer.

So a reinsurer can state the share of the program it wants to cover, based on a blended rate on line and with optional layer price guardrails.

“The Tremor platform is uniquely capable of supporting these new expressive quoting features due to the sophistication of our market design and optimization methods. We need to allow participants to be able to express complex preferences while retaining both the necessary economic incentives and being able to clear the market computationally,” Ben Lubin, CTO of Tremor commented.

While these new quoting features are extremely powerful, they flow natively into Tremor’s proprietary matching engine, which analyses all the complex quotes received to determine true market clearing prices.

This means that a program is neither oversubscribed nor undersubscribed, which of course is key to making the best use of demand for the risk and is designed to result in the most efficient execution.

These enhanced quoting features and technologies to clear the market have been developed during a year-long effort by the Tremor team, taking into account feedback and user requirements from its clients.

Brokers have not been forgotten in the latest round of marketplace updates from Tremor and the company has developed a comprehensive management and analytics dashboard, to help brokers better view their activity in the marketplace and serve their customers while maintaining relationships.

Using this broker portal, brokers can represent their clients as directed using a platform that can even be customised so that when broker clients log-in they see a broker-branded portal of the Tremor exchange.

This kind of white-labelling means that brokers can offer their clients the most sophisticated placement tools available, while still owning the relationship and displaying their own branding to clients.

“These tools enable brokers to maintain client relationships while leveraging the power of Tremor’s independent exchange to achieve unprecedented speed and accuracy. Programmatic integration is also available,” Tremor explained.

Overall, Tremor’s new Version 2.0 release of the programmatic reinsurance and risk placement marketplace brings the latest smart market technology to re/insurance users on all sides of the market.

Tremor hopes these enhancements will help to deliver “unrivaled programmatic transaction results to the benefit of all market stakeholders,” and the company said it will continue to listen to user and market feedback to iteratively enhance the user experience and functionality of the software.

Tremor wants “to create the most competitive, fair and efficient independent risk transfer marketplace in the world.”

That’s something the industry actually really needs and that could allow market participants to spend much more effort on designing the underlying terms of their risk transfer, to make it more effective, safe in the knowledge that when it comes to the placement it is being achieved in the most efficient manner possible.

Also read:

– Reinsurance buyers say Tremor saved them time & money: RVS panel.

– Tremor provides efficiency for the re/insurance system: W. R. Berkley Corporation’s Emmendorfer.

– Tremor raises $10m. W. R. Berkley, Nephila, Markel & Anthemis participate.