Parametric insurance solutions continue to be more broadly adopted, but the technology behind their triggers is also critical and solutions are developing fast. 

Artemis recently spoke with Callum Higgins from Moody’s RMS, a Product Manager for Moody’s RMS event response services, and Martin Hotz, Head Parametric Nat Cat at Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, to learn more about how parametric triggers are used in hurricane insurance and risk transfer today. 

The pair discussed advanced catastrophe risk modelling tools and their application in delivering parametric risk transfer solutions, with a particular focus on hurricane risk and the Moody’s RMS HWind product. 

Higgins explained some of the use-cases for the HWind product in risk transfer and said that, "Specifically, in the insurance-linked securities space, around live cat trading for instance, making decisions around that, but also on the investor relations side. So being able to communicate to your investors while the storms approaching lands, what that could mean for the funds, for instance. 

"The ILS space is one area we've seen HWind forecasting in particular being used quite a lot." 

Hotz highlighted how Swiss Re uses the HWind product, saying, "We offer parametric hurricane insurance to our commercial insureds based on the wind-speed data from Moody's RMS and their HWind real-time data and we have issued our first policy that settles based on HWind back in 2016. 

"So we're now in our eighth hurricane season of providing such cover and did pay also in some of the industry-shaping events over the past couple of years. 

"For us, HWind meets the criteria of being a fast, independent and reliable data service, which as with any parametric policy is always at the core." 

Listen to this full podcast episode for insights into parametric insurance and risk transfer, as well as the role of models and real-time data in parametric triggers.