Q&A with Alastair Speare-Cole, President of Insurance at QOMPLX

Alastair Speare-Cole, President and General Manager of the Insurance Division at QOMPLX, leads the overall strategy for the business unit, the development of QOMPLX’s underwriting-as-a-service platform, the management of the company’s Managing General Agent (MGA), as well as setting the direction for the company’s next-generation insurance decision platform that leverages a wide variety of data and advanced analytics to provide advanced risk and portfolio management solutions. Prior to joining QOMPLX, he served as Chief Underwriting Officer at Qatar, and he served as the CEO of JLT Towers from 2012 to 2015. He was also COO at Aon Re for ten years and has also held board appointments at reinsurance and banking subsidiaries in the United Kingdom.

Over the span of my career, I have seen this industry move from crude and manual deterministic models to stochastic models, SAAS actuarial tools, catastrophe modeling, and entity-level capital modeling.



MEDIA 7: Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional career?
ALASTAIR SPEARE-COLE:
I have spent much of my career involved in reinsurance where portfolios of risk are analyzed and traded. Over the span of my career, I have seen this industry move from crude and manual deterministic models to stochastic models, SAAS actuarial tools, catastrophe modeling, and entity-level capital modeling. And so, my career has shadowed this trajectory. Especially in the eighties, when I was involved in designing and building some of the early models.


M7: QOMPLX has recently partnered with COMBUS. What does this partnership bring to the table?
ASC:
I have long been a fan of COMBUS and Will Gardner, whom I have worked with in the past. The insurance industry has become reliant on too few dominant models. Models as we have seen in recent months over COVID-19 approximate reality but are always just that, an approximation. And it should be no surprise that their limitations show differences between what is predicted and what actually happens. One strategy to combat this is to have multiple ways of modeling the same thing. The insight gained from different views is key to developing a better understanding. The success of COMBUS and other independent modeling companies is vital to creating a diversity of views and our aim is to try to make them more easily accessible and integrable into insurers’ and reinsurers’ platforms.


Models as we have seen in recent months over COVID-19 approximate reality but are always just that, an approximation. And it should be no surprise that their limitations show differences between what is predicted and what actually happens.



M7: How do QOMPLX’s Insurance products help businesses overcome the problems in the insurance value chain?
ASC:
There has been an arms race going on within the insurance industry around gathering and using data for risk selection, risk pricing, and getting clients through the front door. Everyone wants faster insight and the ability to make faster decisions. Our concept is to provide people with a Lego kit of enterprise-grade software that will help them link everything together- from ingestion, organization, storage, and analysis for structured and unstructured data, co-integrated with insurance-specific workflow solutions built on a common underlying data fabric to delivering an edge in decision making, risk selection, and loss control.


M7: What are some of the challenges in risk management in the post-COVID-19 era?
ASC:
Business interruption has been an increasing concern for all risk managers, not just those who worry about the ‘just-in-time’ process and supply chain. COVID-19 has demonstrated that the business interruption coverage offered by insurers is often poorly constructed, not tailored to a world where intangible assets are as valuable as tangible and where there are some risks that are so systemic that only governments can cope with the accumulation of tail risk.


There has been an arms race going on within the insurance industry around gathering and using data for risk selection, risk pricing, and getting clients through the front door. Everyone wants faster insight and the ability to make faster decisions.



M7: What do you see as the future of InsurTech? How is QOMPLX contributing to its growth?
ASC:
There is a huge wave of investment in InsurTech. Whilst the ideas these startups encapsulate may inspire permanent evolution of insurance, as individual businesses many will fail. Tackling a small slice on an insured’s risk, however originally done, is not going to work if the results in insured having to buy dozens of niche products that still leave gaps. Insurers will not continue to support InsurTechs that cannot build scale and scaling means distribution which is expensive. And most InsurTechs like to build their own software when they could adapt off-the-shelf products. And this means that much of their seed money goes on this which is inessential, rather than distribution which is crucial. We are looking hard at ways of working with other partners to allow people who have a great idea to take it to market, rather than trying to build a standalone business which may saddle the idea with costs that it cannot afford.


M7: What is the best advice you’ve received?
ASC:
I think it is encapsulated by Kipling’s poem “If.”

ABOUT QOMPLX

QOMPLX helps organizations make intelligent business decisions and better manage risk through our advanced, proprietary risk cloud. We are the leaders at rapidly ingesting, transforming, and contextualizing large, complex, and disparate data sources through our cloud-native data factory in order to help organizations better quantify, model, and predict risk. Our specialized experts and technology solutions in cybersecurity, insurance, and finance power leading global corporations and mission-critical public sector agencies.

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Google Cloud and Bloomberg Unite to Accelerate Customers Data Strategies

Bloomberg | November 06, 2023

Bloomberg and Google Cloud integrate Data License Plus (DL+) with BigQuery for efficient data access and analytics. Customers can access fully modeled data within BigQuery, eliminating data preparation time. Mackenzie Investments adopts DL+ ESG Manager to host the acquisition, management, and publishing of Multi-vendor ESG data. Bloomberg has unveiled a new offering designed to accelerate the data strategies of Google Cloud customers by integrating Bloomberg's cloud-based data management solution, Data License Plus (DL+), with Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless data warehouse, BigQuery. Now, with access to Bloomberg's extensive experience modeling, managing, and delivering vast quantities of complex content, mutual customers can receive their Bloomberg Data License (DL) data, entirely modeled and seamlessly combined within BigQuery. As a result, organizations can leverage the advanced analytics capabilities of Google Cloud to extract more value from critical business information quickly and efficiently with minimal data wrangling. Through this extended collaboration, customers can harness the powerful analytics features of BigQuery and tap into Bloomberg's extensive collection of datasets available through Data License to power their most essential workloads. Bloomberg's Data License content offers a wide variety, including reference, pricing, ESG, regulatory, estimates, fundamentals, and historical data, supporting operational, quantitative, and investment research workflows, covering over 70 million securities and 40,000 data fields. Key benefits include: Direct Access to Bloomberg Data in BigQuery: Bloomberg customers can seamlessly access Bloomberg Data License content within BigQuery, allowing for scalable use across their organization. This eliminates the time-consuming tasks of ingesting and structuring third-party datasets, thereby accelerating the time-to-value for analytics projects. Elimination of Data Barriers: Google Cloud and Bloomberg will make Bloomberg's DL+ solution available to mutual customers via BigQuery. This allows for the delivery of fully modeled Bloomberg data and multi-vendor ESG content within their analytics workloads. In a recent announcement, Bloomberg revealed that Mackenzie Investments has selected DL+ ESG Manager to host the acquisition, management, and publishing of multi-vendor ESG data. This move positions Mackenzie Investments to implement ESG investing strategies more efficiently and develop sophisticated ESG-focused insights and investment products, with BigQuery playing a central role in powering these analytics workloads moving forward. Don Huff, the Global Head of Client Services and Operations at Bloomberg Data Management Services, stated that as capital markets firms are in the process of migrating their workloads to the Cloud, their customers require efficient access to high-quality data in a preferred environment. He expressed excitement about extending their partnership with Google Cloud, aiming to stay at the forefront of innovation in financial data management and to enhance their customers' enterprise analytics capabilities. Stephen Orban, the VP of Migrations, ISVs, and Marketplace at Google Cloud, stated that Google Cloud and Bloomberg share a common commitment to empowering customers making data-driven decisions to power their businesses. He mentioned that the expanded alliance between the two companies would allow customers to effortlessly integrate Bloomberg's leading datasets with their own data within BigQuery. This would simplify the process of conducting analytics with valuable insights related to financial markets, regulations, ESG, and other critical business information.

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