On-demand cat modelling brings big benefits to (re)insurers: Xceedance’s Davies

With the North Atlantic hurricane season in full swing, head of the EMEA region for Xceedance, Justin Davies, speaks to The Insurer about the firm’s bespoke proposition that can be tailored to clients’ own datasets.

Davies explained that the Xceedance service is an on-demand cat modelling function, established as a joint venture with Oasis – an open source, free-to-use loss modelling framework.

He said that customisable, results produced by the software can target what’s important to each client.

“The service is predicated on clients being able to send us their data, us being able to model them on the Oasis platform using that client’s choice of country peril models,” Davies said. “We then send them back the model results and they pay on a ‘per-hit’ basis.”

After mass destruction wrought by Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas, as the monumental storm made landfall at Category 5, services offered by Xceedance are not only timely, but a reminder of the vital part accurate modelling plays for busy carriers – particularly as they come under pressure to improve cost and performance ratios.

“It benefits insurers and reinsurers because they’re able to very quickly, very easily, and cost effectively access models they wouldn’t necessarily be able to access otherwise,” Davies said.

“Or where business as usual demands on their staff means they just don’t have the bandwidth to get to those models,” he added.

Unlike peers in the market, Davies pointed towards Xceedance’s ability to deep-dive into different components of insurer’s businesses as a key differentiator:

“We think this service is different from anything else in the market. I think there are players out there who are able to model portfolios and send back results. We don’t see any companies who are able to model accounts, so we think that’s a differentiator in the market.”