Having successfully reduced human contact and viral transmission through shelter-at-home policies, governments at different stages in Europe, the U.S. and Asia Pacific are faced with managin… Read More

Many thousands of events around the world have marked Women’s History Month during March, to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Women’s… Read More

Robert Muir-Wood, Chief Risk Officer, RMS Tim Edwards, Regional Director – Head of Catastrophe Analytics Globals, Willis Re This article was originally published in Insurance Day The e… Read More

Perhaps the most difficult and unfamiliar feature of the coronavirus pandemic is how the associated risk is rising rapidly through time. We are all used to managing our response to risks tha… Read More

Dr. Tedros Adhonom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), has insisted that containment of COVID-19 is feasible, and must remain the top priority for all count… Read More

At this moment, you might expect a blog about European windstorms to be about recent Storms Ciara-Sabine, Dennis and Jorge causing wind and flood losses of a couple of billion euros in Europ… Read More

Imagine being seated for eleven hours on a plane next to a passenger wearing an anti-viral face mask, and with a hand sanitizer clipped to his back-pack, which he dipped into for cough relie… Read More

The village of Eyam in Derbyshire, central England, was unlucky to discover that the pandemic, then raging 150 miles (226 kilometers) to the south in London, had arrived on its doorstep. &nb&hell…Read More

Since 2017, in modeling the threat from wildfire on communities in California, the significant new RMS innovation has been in capturing the process of “spotting” (i.e. identifyin… Read More

Since 2017, in modeling the threat from wildfire on communities in California, the significant new RMS innovation has been in capturing the process of “spotting” (i.e. identifyin… Read More

It is an exciting time for the insurance and wider risk management industry. As of January 31, a new asset for the industry – the Risk Data Open Standard (RDOS) has been made publicly… Read More

Natural disasters and other large catastrophes can trigger huge economic losses potentially among multiple insurance lines. RMS, in collaboration with research partner Cambridge Centre for R… Read More

In the spring of 2003, RMS pioneered quantitative event cancellation risk analysis with a study for FIFA in respect of the 2006 World Cup in Germany. As it happened, SARS was first repo… Read More

In 2017, WannaCry infected computers in over 150 countries across the globe, taking out critical functions such as the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. One year later, the NotPetya… Read More

The Risk Data Open Standard (RDOS) Steering Committee that guides and oversees this standard was busy in 2019 working to shape the RDOS, to enable the risk industry to simplify risk manageme… Read More

Epidemiologists are disease detectives. The investigative insights of a forensic epidemiologist are exemplified by Sherlock Holmes, whose creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, qualified as a medical… Read More

Mid-January saw the publication of the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) “Global Risks Report” timed to set the agenda during this week’s WEF Annual Meeting in Davos. With… Read More

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has celebrated its fiftieth-year at its annual meeting in Davos. Increasingly the business/political nexus has become that articulated in WEF founder Klaus Sch… Read More

When the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) was first identified as a coronavirus in 2012, the case fatality rate was very high at 35 percent; but thankfully there was very low human-to… Read More

In March 2018, RMS hosted the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) workshop at our Newark headquarters in California to discuss the interim updates planned for the 2018 USGS National Seismic Hazard… Read More

In this the centennial year of the great 1918 pandemic, I was invited to speak at a special symposium on emerging infectious diseases at the renowned Pasteur Institute in Paris. One pre… Read More

In our previous blog post, we reviewed how RMS has developed Risk Maturity Benchmarking, a tool to help clients understand their current processes and maturity and create a blueprint for imp… Read More

Helping clients through the evolution of catastrophe modeling is a core mission for RMS Consulting. To assist in the process we have developed a tool called Risk Maturity Benchmarking, which… Read More

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. The magnitude 7.0 event ruptured a thrust fault associated with the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system 25 k… Read More

The sheer scale of the Australian bushfires is hard to comprehend, as what has already been a long bushfire season continues apace. Australia’s most-populous state, New South Wales (NS… Read More

“Trump is a joke: why satire makes sense when politics doesn’t.” This was the title of a presentation at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State on February 20… Read More

If you are part of the risk management industry, you are acutely aware of the impact catastrophes have. Because of that understanding, many risk professionals actively help communities in ne… Read More

The core idea behind catastrophe modeling is that the architecture of risk quantification is the same whatever the peril. While a hurricane is not an earthquake, building a hurricane catastr… Read More

Safety from volcanic eruptions is heavily influenced by economic factors. Those who earn their livelihood from farming around a volcano may be reluctant to evacuate, and those who opera… Read More

Over the past 15 years, we have witnessed some of the world’s largest possible recorded earthquakes that have had catastrophic impacts around the globe. But, looking back 30 years to 1… Read More

Twenty years ago, while the planet was getting ready for transitioning to year 2000 and trying to solve the Y2K bug, the (re)insurance industry in Europe got caught by surprise by windstorm… Read More

Cautious optimism surrounds the January 1, 2020 reinsurance renewals, with expectations that the anticipated hardening of rates might be realized – to a modest degree at least. Reinsur… Read More

Why a “Science”? (Part One) A new article, The Science of Cyber Risk: A Research Agenda has just been published in Science. A free, non-paywall version of this paper is available… Read More

This article was originally published by DZone What Is Risk Analytics? The picture below on the left shows the extensive flooding at industrial parks north of Bangkok, Thailand. Western Digi… Read More

The Source Model The 2010 M7.1 Darfield earthquake in New Zealand started a sequence of events that propagated eastward in the Canterbury region over several years, collectively causing upwa… Read More

The Liquefaction Model The 2010 M7.1 Darfield earthquake in New Zealand started a sequence of events – the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES), that propagated eastward in the Canterb… Read More

A few hundred yards from where Stephen Hawking first explored black holes from his wheelchair, is the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. Hawking never shied away from r… Read More

Global sea levels are rising. After two thousand years of stability, the transition to continuous coastal change will be jarring (although this is what our shoreline ancestors experienced mo… Read More

The first time I noticed the coincidence I assumed there had been a mistake. The most-costly flooding in modern Italian history inundated the city of Florence on November 4, 1966. The Arno r… Read More

This blog was first published as an article in Insurance Day The victims of the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, the injured and the dependents of the 57 who died have one comfort followin… Read More

Interest in the 160-mile-long Garlock Fault, the second-largest fault in California, has been piqued recently after a Los Angeles Times article about deformation on the Garlock Fault due to… Read More

Technological advances in communications, computing and computer networks are exposing new vulnerabilities that terrorist groups can exploit, making cyberterrorism a potential security conce… Read More

It has been a year since the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history. The Camp Fire burnt some 153,336 acres, starting at Camp Creek Road, two miles from the sm… Read More

The Twitterverse got its chance to pose cyber risk questions to a panel of distinguished experts at the NetDiligence® Cyber Risk Summit in Santa Monica on October 16. RMS and NetDiligenc… Read More

If on-the-ground underwriters can get risk insight instantly – and can make a quick check simply by entering a location rather than waiting for a risk analyst or trying to gather publi… Read More

The death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a significant blow to the global salafi-jihadist movement. Since al-Baghdadi declared himself caliph of IS in the summer of 2014, his name has been… Read More

As my colleague Mohsen Rahnama reminded us in his recent blog, the last destructive earthquake to strike Northern California was on October 17, 1989. Loma Prieta was a magnitude 6.9 earthqua… Read More

Thirty years ago, the Mw6.9 Loma Prieta Earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area. When looking back at disasters, it is always particularly relevant to understand the moment in time impa… Read More

Risk scoring is a fundamental part of the property and casualty underwriting process, allowing underwriters to sort and rank the quality of submissions. This process culminates in criti… Read More

The main topic of discussion within the terrorism insurance marketplace currently relates to the U.S. Terrorism Risk Insurance Protection and Reauthorization Act (TRIPRA), which will expire… Read More

Despite the paucity of large-scale terrorism attacks in North America, the multifaceted terrorism threat in the U.S. continues to be a significant one that must be managed by the (re)in… Read More

Japan continues to assess the extent of the damage caused by Typhoon Hagibis, which made landfall near the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture on Saturday, October 12. Current reports state… Read More

RMS launches new exposure management application focused on the portfolio manager – ExposureIQ on the new cloud platform, Risk Intelligence™. The role of a portfolio manager is a… Read More

The last two North America wildfire seasons have seen total insured losses skyrocket to over US$23 billion – compared to 1991-2010 where average annual losses totaled US$600 milli… Read More

If you are a business insurer, then your clients are typically being exposed to cyber risk. As RMS has discussed previously in our 2019 Cyber Risk Outlook, the digital economy has become mor… Read More

As of Thursday afternoon (October 10), Super Typhoon Hagibis remains a powerful Category 4 equivalent hurricane with maximum sustained wind speeds of 150 miles per hour (240 kilometers per h… Read More

During September, RMS ran a series of cyber risk seminars in London and New York. These half-day events coincided with the release of RMS Cyber Solutions version 4.0 and featured both RMS an… Read More

Typhoon Faxai was the strongest landfalling typhoon to impact the Greater Tokyo area since Typhoon Ma-on in 2004. Making two landfalls as it traveled across the Tokyo Bay, Faxai made a brief… Read More

On Thursday, September 26, a contingent from RMS attended the Reactions’ 2019 North America (Re)Insurance Conference and Awards in New York. It was such an enjoyable event and it was a… Read More

Almost three months ago we passed a remarkable record in catastrophe loss. And yet no one seems to want to celebrate it. No banner headlines in the newspapers. No speeches at the Monte Carlo… Read More

Power outages in Chiba Prefecture looked set to continue into the coming weeks as the region continues to recover from Typhoon Faxai. It was one of the strongest landfalling typhoons on reco… Read More

The year 2020 is just months away, and in the latest edition of EXPOSURE — the RMS magazine for risk management professionals, we consider some of the changes that the (re)insurance in… Read More

In late 2005 I was on New Providence Island, Bahamas, producing a map to show which properties around the island were within the storm surge flood zone. The northern islands of the Bahamas h… Read More

The democratizion of risk data is a core mission for RMS; to provide relevant, timely risk insight to everyone who needs it, designed for every role in the business, from those on the frontl… Read More

Initial reports from the Bahamas suggest that the islands of Great Abaco and Grand Bahama have been left devastated from Major Hurricane Dorian, evoking memories of the destruction on the ea… Read More

Hurricane Dorian looks set to pass over the northern Bahamas in the coming days as potentially a Category 5 major hurricane, but forecasts regarding future U.S. impacts remain significantly… Read More

The recent allegations against General Electric (GE) read like a financial thriller: Bernie Madoff whistle-blower teams up with anonymous hedge fund to expose the alleged financial misdeeds… Read More

Now that we’ve reached the halfway stage of the 2019 North Atlantic hurricane season, now feels like a good opportunity to review the season to date and look ahead to what the remainde… Read More

Every twist and turn of a real-time hurricane can affect global financial markets, public safety, or government and international aid agencies that provide assistance. Within the (re)insuran… Read More

The first half of 2019 had been unusually quiet in the western North Pacific tropical cyclone basin. Following the dissipation of the strongest-ever February typhoon – Wutip, there wer… Read More

Imagine, instead of trying to communicate the prospective climate change future, you could just time travel to experience the weather of 2050. In place of having to convince the city enginee… Read More

Terrorism is a global menace that spreads like a virus along social networks. On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant killed 51 Muslims attending Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurc… Read More

From our numerous client conversations, climate change as a business issue has risen high on the agenda, and this has certainly escalated over the last twelve months. There is a growing reco… Read More

The revised earthquake coverages and caps proposed by the New Zealand Earthquake Commission (EQC) came into law as planned on July 1, 2019. As noted in an RMS blog back in February, these we… Read More

The recent events that shook a relatively remote part of the Mojave Desert region of Eastern California provide an acute reminder of the major risk posed by earthquakes in the state. It has… Read More

Assessing the risks faced by the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) would go well beyond the norms of the insurance industry. On January 17, 2002, a large part of the cit… Read More

We are pleased to announce that RMS Risk Intelligence™ version 1.12 has now been released. This new release includes many improvements such as the introduction of new Structure Tags an… Read More

It was off to another prestigious London venue last week for the RMS team, to attend the Insurance Post British Insurance Awards at the Royal Albert Hall. In addition to fulfilling lifelong… Read More

Data – the buzzword of the decade. The world understands its value, but the insurance industry has not only lagged behind in exploiting data, it has also created huge inefficiencies in… Read More

Earlier this year, RMS released its latest medium-term rates (MTR) forecast for the North Atlantic hurricane basin as part of the North Atlantic Hurricane Models Version 18.1 release. Applic… Read More

What will cyber-risk look like in 2030? Given the rate of change of technology this may seem like an impossible question to answer. But for those making investments that depend on these new… Read More

RMS is proud to be a gold sponsor for this year’s Dive In – the festival for diversity and inclusion in the insurance industry. Dive In has gained such great traction around the… Read More

The inquests into the deaths of eight individuals killed in a terrorist attack on London Bridge and in Borough Market on June 3, 2017, were held at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, Lo… Read More

This is a taster of an article published in the latest edition of EXPOSURE magazine featuring the RMS Location Intelligence API. For the full article click here or visit the EXPOSURE website… Read More

It was off to London’s Savoy Hotel for members of the RMS London team last Thursday, for the Eleventh Trading Risk Awards. And apart from the great hospitality, and the flowing convers… Read More

Whenever the U.K. is hit by major flooding, attention quickly turns to the performance of the nation’s flood defenses. Some defenses, such as London’s Thames Barrier, are regular… Read More

This is a taster of an article published in the latest edition of EXPOSURE magazine featuring the new RMS application – SiteIQTM. For the full article click here or visit the… Read More

Situation It has been reported that the current Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) epidemic, which has caused over 1,300 confirmed deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since its onset… Read More

Without the ability to measure, how do we know if we are making progress? In December 2012, in preparation for the renewal of the UN Millennium Development Goals, I wrote a report for the U… Read More

Late May 2019 was a startlingly active period for severe convective storms (SCS) in the U.S., even after considering that May is typically one of the most active months of the year. Until ab… Read More

The 2019 North Atlantic hurricane season officially got underway on Saturday, June 1, and marked the start of a six-month period that runs right through to November 30. Blatantly ignoring th… Read More

In March this year, I joined a team of six RMS employees and three clients travelling to Manila in the Philippines on the annual RMS Impact Trek, as part of an ongoing partnership with Build… Read More

Just over a year ago, I was in Manila for a workshop on the design of PCDIP – the Philippines City Disaster Insurance Pool. Recognizing the Philippines as a country prone to earthquake… Read More

What do the 393 grounded Boeing 737 MAX aircraft have in common with BP’s “Deepwater Horizon” fire and uncontrolled oil release, or with Volkswagen’s (VW) “chea… Read More

With the start of the U.S. wildfire season on the horizon, in the latest edition of EXPOSURE – the RMS magazine for risk management professionals, wildfire is our lead story, as we exa… Read More

In 1915, Cuthbert Heath – pioneer of catastrophe insurance at Lloyds of London, decided to offer insurance policies to cover the impacts of war, far from the front line. Zeppelin airsh… Read More

It has been a momentous Exceedance here in Miami, with a raft of new product launches, excitement around transformation in our keynotes, a sea of new insight from across over sixty track ses… Read More

After a great birthday reception yesterday evening, with RMS celebrating thirty years in business, the time to look back had past, as the keynote sessions for day two at Exceedance were all… Read More

The opening keynote at Exceedance clearly set the agenda for this year’s conference – the future of risk. Karen White, chief executive officer for RMS, in her opening address, su… Read More

To everyone who is already here, or is en route to the Exceedance conference – joining us in Miami from around the world, a warm welcome awaits as the global risk management commu… Read More