For many Americans, Thanksgiving is a time to put thoughts of work away if only for the day. But in 1992, that wasn't the case for insurance veteran James Stanard.

Mr. Stanard realised that a crippling storm - Hurricane Andrew - that had hit the Southern US states earlier that year had created a property-catastrophe reinsurance capacity void.

That spelled opportunity for those wanting to break into the market and Mr. Stanard found himself, that Thanksgiving, thinking about how he wanted to be one of those to seize the moment. The rest is history as they say, with RenaissanceRe opening its door for business some seven months later.

Mr. Stanard remembered: "In 1992, I was working at USF&G with (insurance veteran) Norman Blake. I was working on the primary (insurance) side, but I had been in reinsurance much of my career. And personally, I wanted to get back into reinsurance. After Hurricane Andrew, it seemed like a great opportunity to start a reinsurance company... over Thanksgiving, 1992, I put the business plan together," he said.

Business plan in hand, Mr. Stanard went to his then-boss and chairman of USF&G Norman Blake, who liked the idea. Thereafter, the two rallied investors, including General Electric pension fund, and were open for business by mid-June, 1993.

RenaissanceRe was the second company - it followed Mid Ocean Re which had set up the previous November - of the eight reinsurers to open its doors in response to the void in property catastrophe reinsurance after the monumental insured losses posted as a result of Hurricane Andrew.

Ten years on Mr. Stanard isn't surprised that Renaissance (RenRe) is still going strong, he always saw the venture as a long-term commitment: "We were definitely trying to build a long-term business. A market crisis, like happened in 1993, is a window of opportunity for companies to start up but the real way to create value is to create a sustainable franchise. We wanted to build a business that could prosper throughout the entire market cycle," he said.

Prosper it has, with Mr. Stanard claiming that Renaissance has never posted a quarterly loss. The company, which went public in 1995, has also consistently made a solid return for its shareholders: "One of the keys for us has been effective management of risk. As a result we have been profitable every quarter and we've never had a year with an operating return on equity under 17 percent, including all the years that had (major) losses including 1999 and 2001," Mr. Stanard said.

But how has RenRe managed its outstanding performance when so many of its competitors have, at least in certain quarters in recent years, posted multi-million dollar losses? Mr. Stanard said one key element in the company's success had been its use of computer models to assess levels of risk.

Mr. Stanard said the modelling systems had proved especially important when markets were soft and competition was at a peak: "You didn't really need models to write business in 1993 when everything was very good. But it was at that time that we started to develop (our) models (to assess levels of exposure) so that when the market began to soften we could remain sustainable. We had to have a way to manage our portfolio when it wasn't raining money anymore," Mr. Stanard said.

Mr. Stanard said the magnitude of the losses after Hurricane Andrew, may have spurred on the development of the computer-based systems.

RenRe was a forerunner of that development with its building of its own models: "Andrew was such a significant event. It really changed the way companies looked at catastrophe exposure.

The technical departments of big companies they may have been running some models but certainly from a top manager point of view, companies were not really looking at the possibility of storms over $10 billion. It just wasn't something that people were looking at, and no one was capturing data about where the risks were."

But Mr. Stanard said that changed after Hurricane Andrew: Suddenly this (risk assessment) became a CEO and board level issue. It became clear that there needed to be systems to show where (one's) property risks were located and to assess your exposure," he said.

RenRe's own internal systems - called Renaissance Exposure Management System (REMS) - have been under development from those first days: "In the beginning, it was a crude version. Now it has gone through many re-writes since then...," he said, adding that RenRe developed its own systems because there wasn't any other tool available to assess property-catastrophe risks at the time, at least not on a worldwide basis.

Mr. Stanard said: "The vendor models were good as far as they went but none of the models at that time covered the whole world. We wanted to develop a tool for underwriting individual contracts and understanding how those contracts affected the whole portfolio. The vendor models at the time didn't really allow you to do that," he said.

A decade later, Mr. Stanard said the use of models had been embraced by more and more insurance and reinsurance companies: "It is fair to say that we have been a leader in the field but today many companies are using models and using them effectively. Our early use though (of models) has given us a base of experience. And now that our system is in its eighth re-write, we've got an incredibly clean database. That gives us some advantages over an organisation that is just starting to use models."