An email from a company called Weather Trade Net dropped into my inbox last week. It was super interesting. Based on geocodes, the company assesses physical climate-change risks to properties, helping insurers comply with new regulations like IFRS S2.

I don’t know about much about the tech beyond the email. But if it does what is says on the tin, the tool could provide underwriters with an invaluable snapshot of one view of physical climate change risk in a portfolio, and its potential accumulation.

We’re entering a new era for specialty underwriting. All sorts of previously unfathomable types of data can now be deployed and embraced to support the underwriting of individual risks.

These many new information sources can also be used in portfolio analysis. Combined with artificial intelligence, they can distil immediate insights into the current state of the array of evolving threats which swirl around individual insured assets.  They can reveal potentially costly accumulations before they manifest, enabling diversification.

This approach will, no doubt, transform underwriting in the years and decades ahead. It already facilitates our ability to practise genuine dynamic underwriting, and to cast the concept of a “market price for risk” into the dustbin of history by enabling continuous discovery of the true risk-based price.

It’s an exciting time to be a developer of systems which allow individual human underwriters too have all that data at their fingertips, in just the right place, so they can make properly informed underwriting judgments.

A tool that makes this happen would ingest portfolio data in various forms, then calculate and report on multiple views of risk based on a variety of data streams to deliver a range of user-defined outputs. It would be endlessly scalable with unlimited flexibility, so any number of data streams that influence risk could be incorporated, weighted, and assessed.

It would be incredibly powerful. Unlimited variability and versatility in the management, analysis, and delivery of risk data is ideal basis for modern underwriting. Everything that doesn’t do that is just old tech.