Oasis 2022 flashback

The 7th annual Oasis Conference, taking place in late September at Swiss Re Institute's Centre for Global Dialogue, brought one hundred and twenty key stakeholders together. The event was positively humming with insights and exchanges, and with the spirit to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow together.

Oasis provides an open-source platform for catastrophe models. What began in 2012, and is actively supported by Swiss Re, is today a widely used software, framework and set of standards that benefit the insurance industry, model builders, scientists, SMEs around the world, as well as developing countries and cities. Oasis is about transparency, choice and innovation and it is, ultimately, about the democratization of risk.

As in recent years, the conference was opened by co-hosts Dickie Whitaker (CEO of Oasis) and Beat Aeberhardt (Head Cat Perils R&D at Swiss Re and Oasis board member). While a great deal has happened in the first decade of Oasis, the event gave a sense that it has taken a leap forward by taking it to the enterprise level. At Swiss Re, Oasis software is now deployed and Swiss Re modelers are already using it on a daily basis. The 'ramping up' of Oasis was also on full display with the increasing number of models and the participation of vendors that showcased their products at market stands.

 

Opening remarks

During his opening remarks, Beat Aeberhardt smiled and said how proud he was to be part of the Oasis journey. Even as just an outside-in observer, it was easy to understand how he feels. There's a true sense of collaboration and community when it comes to Oasis. There's agency, yes, there's all the rational and obvious value – but there's also heart and care. I saw this on display many times over the years. In the way this community engages, in the way Dickie and Beat speak and nurture, in the way the networks are fostered and lived. A tremendous amount of work by many dedicated people has gone into the journey from 2012 to now – and what's been achieved so far would have been impossible without the unceasing dedication and constant championing by Dickie Whitacker himself. Frankly, at this point his name is near-synonymous with Oasis!

The first part of the conference:

It was Oasis CTO Ben Hayes who kicked things off with a presentation about the Oasis Enterprise (or Oasis at scale) project, running now, with the aim of delivering on performance, reliability and additional functionalities. Hayes highlighted what's already been achieved and what's in the works until the project completes in April of next year. As Oasis measures itself against other platforms, where do they stand? In the Q&A, Dickie Whitacker shared that, independently verified, Oasis has the fastest platform, with great reliability and features on par with other providers.

The next session brought to the stage an illustrious panel with John Schneider (Secretary General of the GEM Foundation), Ole Hanekop (Senior Actuarial Analyst at Hannover Re) and Michael Ewald (Earthquake Perils Lead at Swiss Re). They shared learnings from their joint development of the Earthquake China model. At this point, in addition to the China model, GEM also offers earthquake models for Colombia and South Africa – all of them built on the Oasis platform. Schneider showed GEM's roadmap to 2030, highlighting a focus on secondary hazards, multi-hazard and systemic risk assessment, and, by 2030, integrated risk and resilience solutions. Both Ole Hanekop and Michael Ewald then shared their insights from the intensive collaboration that delivered the China model.

Then it was Big Ticket's time. If you've not heard of Big Ticket, you're forgiven – the company has only just been founded. What it provides is a digital infrastructure, as they say, "to fast-track efficiency, innovation and growth for commercial insurance." Big Ticket's Co-Founder and CEO Rob Bartlett was there to pitch Big Ticket and its aim to be to become for the insurance industry what 'neutral digital infrastructure' has long been for the banking industry. What he says certainly appears compelling and he highlighted how Big Ticket is ramping up over the course of this and next year. Big Ticket, Bartlett said, is operational today and is already onboarding clients. One of them, Lee Worth, Head of Group Insurance at Specsavers, was on hand to share his Big Ticket experience with the audience. When asked about Origami and Riskonnect, Bartlett said he doesn't see them as competitors, but as partners instead. And where they and many others are providing products, Big Ticket's only product is infrastructure. "We are the plumbing," Bartlett added, "We're like Cisco, not like Facebook – we don't see data." Compelling, indeed!

Martin Bertogg, Swiss Re's Head of Cat Perils, Cyber and Geo, took a few moments before the break to share his enthusiasm and to offer a few insights. He was thrilled by just how far the collaborative Oasis efforts have come – from ambition to operating model. At the same time he urged everyone to continue, to strive to get cat models ever more right. Martin highlighted the big picture of catastrophe losses since the 1970s, then focused on that last five years that have seen the world bombarded by nat cat activity. What's needed, Martin said, is an intensified focus on more than just the key perils, a consistent use and sharing of models across the value chain, and an ever-greater effort of co-creating open-source models as they boost efficiency, risk literacy and trust.

 

The second part of the conference:

Part two of the conference began with a presentation about unmodelled losses, by Erich Fischer, Senior Scientist and Lecturer at ETH Zurich, and Thierry Corti, Swiss Re's Climate Change Lead. Fischer began by repeating the IPCC's findings that, by now, it is "indisputable that human activities are causing climate change, making extreme climate events, including heat waves, heavy rainfall, and droughts, more frequent and severe." Fischer explained that we need to prepare for events of unprecedented intensity and that what he calls 'physical story lines' become powerful tools for stress testing human systems and ecosystems. In his presentation, Thierry Corti urged for the advancement of nat cat costing models by incorporating emerging risk factors. It was quite fascinating to hear about what currently is and is not modelled. The panel, which also included Iwan Stalder, Zurich's Head of Group Accumulation and Tom Philip, CEO of Maximum Information, talked about a wide range of unmodelled elements, among them, to name just two prominent examples, social inflation and climate tipping points.

The final presentation slot belonged to the aforementioned Tom Philip. He talked about building targeted uncertainty into Oasis-deployed cat models. He gave an overview of cat modelling over the course of the past forty years, showing just how much has happened and how far we've come, then focused on the topic of uncertainty in cat modelling (frequency and severity uncertainty) and went on to make the case for subjectivity. The argument is that a myriad of sources and degrees of uncertainty make objectivity impossible. While academia always aspired to objectivity, Philp suggested to instead grow the understanding of uncertainty, then communicate transparently about both uncertainty and resulting subjective decisions. Philip said: "Hopefully we can standardize how uncertainty is talked about across the industry, how it is communicated, and why it is useful in certain places. If we can't talk about uncertainty, or how uncertainty is changing in the future, it is largely meaningless and doesn't attach to our present." He offered a set of questions that the Oasis framework can help explore and I'm sure the Oasis community will tackle them all. This is where Oasis flourishes – collaborative, open-sourced, transparent – and Philip predicted that an explosion of work and modelling is coming.

The closing words, after rounds of thanks and applause for the many that had made the event such a success, belonged to Dickie Whitacker. He teased upcoming model work on US hurricane and global vulnerability, even capturing social inflation in the US. "We are catalysts," he reminded the audience. "What we do is too hard for any one organization – but together we can do it." As I've written in the beginning, there's expertise abound – but with the Oasis community in general, and with Dickie Whitacker in particular, there's also a great deal of heart and care. If anyone can collate the challenges and uncertainties and bring them together in meaningful ways, it surely is the Oasis community.