Reinsurance executives have a chance to discuss a new method of catastrophe modelling next week during a morning seminar.

Technology and business consulting firm BCS-IBM Bermuda, in partnership with London-based Oasis Loss Modelling Framework (LMF), is hosting a breakfast briefing on the changing landscape of catastrophe modelling on Tuesday, April 16.

The Oasis Loss Modelling Framework is a not-for-profit company supported by Lloyd’s and funded by a community of well-known re/insurers and brokers in the UK, Bermuda, Zurich and the US. Oasis’ objective is to deliver a new method of catastrophe modelling to the industry in 2013.

The event, catering to Bermuda’s reinsurance executives, will discuss the significant paradigm shifts in catastrophe modelling and analytics technology, and its implications for underwriters, risk analysts and modellers.

Speaking at the event will be Dr Peter Taylor, technical director at Oasis LMF, and Matt Kadillak, IBM’s world wide specialist on Spatial Analytics.

“With new techniques and technology we are able to get orders of magnitude run time improvements over conventional approaches,” said Dr Peter Taylor. “This allows us to undertake analyses not previously thought possible very quickly. We can also do these calculations securely over the internet thanks to Oasis’s ‘sparse data’ design.”

Aaron Smith, general manager of BCS-IBM Bermuda highlighted IBM’s heavy investment in analytics and risk management to significantly improve disaster modelling algorithms.

“In the past, actuaries were restricted by the inability to run frequent, fast models,” he said. “With the help from our big data solutions, companies can much more easily integrate huge amounts of historical event data, policy conditions and exposure data into their reinsurance information. They can now analyse trillions of data rows and rapidly deliver results that underwriters can use to price individual policies, rather than using generic data. For example, IBM recently worked with a large property casualty insurance company to demonstrate how they could improve analytical query performance by 100 times”.

The breakfast briefing will be held at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess’ Gazebo Room from 8.15am to 11.00am.

For more information visit www.bcs.bm or contact Robert Cunha at rcunha@bm.ibm.com.