Guy Carpenter & Company has launched CAT Risk Studio (CRS), a new division that will support its Model Suitability Analysis (MSA) initiative and will work closely with GC Securities on the development of parametric products for catastrophe risk transfer.
The launch of CRS has also established Guy Carpenter’s presence at the Marsh & McLennan Innovation Centre in Dublin, Ireland.
"We launched CAT Risk Studio in order to expand the capabilities of Guy Carpenter's [MSA] initiative," said David Lightfoot, head of GC Analytics in the Americas.
"Coupled with our innovative modelling technology and work by our catastrophe risk modelling teams around the world, Guy Carpenter's MSA initiative truly has the potential to become the global reference for catastrophe risk knowledge in the market.”
He continued: “Our team has worked tirelessly over the past three years to design the MSA framework and develop a growing academic research network to support our clients’ desire for defensible confidence in the [catastrophe] modelling results that are increasingly being used to inform capital management and underwriting decisions."
Through an execution of established tests, including the comparison of catastrophe model assumptions with independent data sets, MSA identifies a specific model's strengths and weaknesses, while also allowing users to fine-tune their own tolerances for risk in order to evaluate a model's result.
Guy Carpenter has also expanded its team through two appointments to support CRS.
Jaime Silvela brings more than 12 years of experience at technology-driven enterprises such as Microsoft and Amazon to his new role as the CRS head of software development, while Sergio Pucciano has joined as a CRS research analyst.
Both Silvela and Pucciano will relocate to Dublin in order to continue to build the CRS team within the Marsh & McLennan Innovation Centre while reporting directly to Guillermo Franco, global head of catastrophe risk research.
