By Rick Huckstep

Meteo Protect is a French based, global insurance and reinsurance broker with the largest team in Europe dedicated exclusively to weather risk management.

Back in April, I interviewed Jean-Louis Bertrand and Laura Hersey from the management team (see full post here). They explained how their “Weather Sensitivity Analysis” provides an efficient way to protect cash-flows and P&L performance for all companies affected by weather variations

For many corporations, they blame the weather for their poor financial performance when sales are off, demand is down, inventory is sitting in the warehouse or costs are higher than forecast.

With Meteo Protect, these same corporations can hedge against the unfavourable consequences of weather and buy insurance to protect their financial performance in the knowledge that the risk has been assessed using massive amounts of data directly correlated to it’s own sales performance.

The sheer scale of the technology deployed by Metro Protect is staggering and is only now possible as a result of the advances and availability of massive computing capacity.

Meteo Protect has over 80 billion weather data observations and this weather data goes back over a period spanning thirty years.

Using in-house algorithms, software, data, processes and expertise, they have produced over 50,000 models for 320 industry sectors to provide companies with the most cost-effective financial cover based the most relevant weather index.

What this all means is that Meteo Protect offer global financial products, underwritten by some of the world’s largest insurers. These products protect companies and institutions when weather conditions adversely impact their business or profits or generate additional costs.

Member of the SAP Startup Focus program

They operate on the SAP HANA platform and are a member of SAP’s Startup Focus program. This innovation program started about 4 years ago and is geared at tech startups with a big data, predictive or real-time analytics focus. It has already supported over 2,000 startups and contributed over 175 market ready industry solutions.

The program provides access to expert mentors, senior executives and a route to market as part of the SAP ecosystem. However, where this program differs to most accelerators is that it also provides access to the core technology and development resources that the startup needs for its business.

This is a great idea from SAP to embed the HANA platform into hundreds of startups, betting that many of them will one day be established businesses.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

In November this year, Paris will host the 21^st United Nations conference on climate change. A growing theme of the conference is the engagement of the private sector in achieving the overall goal of keeping global warming below 2^OC.

For financial services, this theme can be traced back to 2006 when the United Nations issued a first statement to take account of climate related issues and integrate them as decision factors for business planning and develop efficient risk transfer products to improve resilience (UNEP-FI, 2006).

Last week, and in advance of the forthcoming United Nations conference, Meteo Protect issued this WHITE PAPER, entitled “The Impact of Climate Variability on the Private Sector”.

The white paper explains how climate variability is measured and used as a new indicator of climate change exposure. It concludes that “with climate variability as a measure of the exposure to climate change, investors have the opportunity to start a conversation with companies on climate exposure and climate risk management. They also have the ability to integrate climate risks today into mainstream portfolios, balance out their overall exposure to climate variability, and transfer undesired risks through weather derivatives.”