European Geo Risk Seminar - Speakers

AXA XL

Alan Milroy

Alan Milroy has 25 years’ experience as a Global Property Underwriter in London and other International Markets. In 2011 he became The Catastrophe Underwriter for XL Catlin’s International Property division bringing greater insight to local underwriters on both modelled and non- modelled risk which included the introduction of GIS into the business in 2014. Since 2016 Alan has headed XL Catlin’s Geospatial team launching its internal GIS platform which has continued to grow both across businesses and territorially. Since the acquisition by AXA last year, Alan’s title has changed to Head of GIS and UW Decision Tools for AXA XL. (The AXA XL division gathers the activities of AXA Corporate Solutions, AXA Matrix, AXA Art and XL Catlin.)

Port of Rotterdam

Erwin Rademaker

Erwin Rademaker (1966) has worked since 2002 with the Port of Rotterdam. He is a published writer and an international award winning executive programme manager. Currently, Erwin is responsible for executing the roadmap of the Digital Twin at PoR. He’s also the inventor of Container 42, the smartest container the planet has ever seen.

Allianz Insurance

Chris Wyard

Chris Wyard is an experienced Head of Data at Allianz Insurance and is responsible for creating and leading the only dedicated Geospatial team across the Allianz Group. Chris is passionate about innovation, the application of data to realise business benefit and challenging data suppliers (private and public sector) to create compelling and easily accessible products and services. Chris is also responsible for data science, business intelligence and smart technology at Allianz, where he has worked for 13 years. Chris has two young children and will be speaking at the European Geo Risk Seminar on his birthday!

Brit Global Specialty

Sheel Sawhney

Sheel Sawhney is Global Head of Claims at Brit Global Specialty (“Brit”), a market-leading global specialty insurer and reinsurer, focused on underwriting complex risks with a major presence in Lloyd’s of London. Sheel is responsible for Brit’s global claim services delivery with oversight of on average over one billion (USD$) in insurance contract liabilities and is on Brit’s Executive Committee. Sheel joined Brit in July 2013, as Chief Operating Officer for Brit USA, based in Chicago, Illinois, and was responsible for Claims, Legal, Actuarial, Product Delivery, HR and various other operational functions supporting the growth strategy in North America. Brit is a member of the Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited group of companies (Fairfax). Prior to joining Brit, Sheel was SVP Chief Operating Officer at Alea Group Holdings (Bermuda) Ltd, having joined Alea from Travelers in 2002, where he held separate roles in both Claims and Communications and before that at American International Group in their Domestic Brokerage Group’s Regulatory-Compliance Division. Sheel is currently a member of the Lloyd’s Managing Agency Claims Council (LMACC), the London Market Claims TOM Steering Board and Chairs the Fairfax Claims Leadership Group.

Knight Frank

Ian McGuinness

Ian is a Partner at Knight Frank and the Head of the firm’s Geospatial Research Team, a capability which provides a clearer understanding of spatial, demographic and economic factors affecting the housing market. Ian has 12 years’ experience in spatial information management, data visualisation and mapping technology. He is a Chartered Geographer, Chartered Land Surveyor, the winner of the British Property Federation’s 2018 Innovation Award, and of the Society of Property Researchers 2018 Annual Prize. Ian previously worked in planning policy at the London Borough of Newham and for demographic data provider CACI. He was also a Troop Commander with the British Army’s 135 Geographic Squadron (Reserve), through which he was attached to Geospatial Ops within the NATO Intelligence Fusion Centre and was awarded the Institution of Royal Engineers 2016 Commanding Officer’s Award for Military Excellence.

Munich Reinsurance Company

Andreas Siebert

The integration of spatial and geographical thinking in the insurance value chain is Andreas´ passion since 25 years. His main focus is the development and implementation of solutions and services to enable underwriters in managing their exposure to natural and man-made catastrophes by combining insurance information with (geo)scientific analytics based on GIS-technology. Since 2004 he is heading the Geospatial Solutions Team at Munich Re leveraging location intelligence and geospatial analytics in the Munich Re Group. Based on new IT solutions (e.g. Hadoop, SAP Hana, ArcGIS Portal) many innovations are aligned to geospatial analytics and data management, leveraging Spatial Big Data and other analytics initiatives (e.g. remote sensing) in the insurance community. In numerous lectures and articles in the geoscience and insurance community he is stressing the benefits of location based solutions in the context of digital transformation and digitalisation

Willis Towers Watson

Sharon Palmer

Sharon Palmer is a Divisional Director at Willis Towers Watson’s leading the Analytics Centre of Excellence, which incorporates geo-intelligence, business intelligence and data science. Sharon spent her early career specialising in geospatial and analytical solutions for both the government and infrastructure sector but since 2006 has focused upon the insurance industry from both an underwriting and broking perspective - developing solutions, integrating both analytics and modelling. As Head of Spatial Analytics at Willis Towers Watson Sharon has utilised the power of location and analytics to enrich, model and collaborate across the wider group to deliver solutions for clients underpinned by an enterprise geospatial and analytics architecture maintained by the Analytics Centre of Excellence. Key themes encountered by the team include analysing exposure aggregation, modelling natural /man-made catastrophes and risk assessment.

JBA Risk Management

Ian Millinship

Ian is a Senior Catastrophe Risk Analyst at JBA Risk Management and leads JBA’s catastrophe model development team. Ian is responsible for designing and implementing deterministic and probabilistic natural hazard models for insurers and reinsurers. These models provide the capacity to quantify the potential losses from catastrophic events. Prior model development has focused on fluvial and pluvial flood, wind and tropical cyclones across the UK, Europe and Asia. Ian is a Chartered Geographer (GIS) and has an MSc in GIS for Catchment Dynamics and Management from the University of Leeds.

UNEP-WCMC

Yichuan Shi

With ten years’ experience in GIS and biodiversity conservation including natural World Heritage, protected areas and threatened species, Yichuan leads UNEP-WCMC’s work on emerging analytics and manages a team of data managers to deliver the Centre’s spatial data strategy. Most recently he led the redevelopment of the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT), a web tool that enables informed decisions using the most authoritative global biodiversity datasets.

The Weather Company, an IBM Business

James Burn

After completing an MSc. in Applied Meteorology in 2004, James worked in the offshore industry as an operational meteorologist for 8 years. As Senior Marine Forecaster, James built and managed weather data servers to provide forecasters with the latest and best weather data to help global offshore operations. Offshore work took him around the world helping a variety of organisations optimise their operations with weather data. This ranged from preparing spectral wave analyses on the world's largest floating crane in the North Sea during hurricane force winds, to modelling the notoriously difficult Caspian Sea winds. With The Weather Company, James helps integrate weather data and services into a variety of global organisations. This entails bridging the gap between technical aspects of meteorological data sets and complex commercial requirements.

Geospatial Intelligence Center

Ryan Bank

Ryan Bank, MD of the Geospatial Intelligence Center (GIC), brings vision and strategy to his organisation’s one-of-a-kind geospatial program that is revolutionising how insurers serve policyholders through location-based information. The GIC was born out of the need for immediate and rapid insight into disaster situations. It now delivers fast and comprehensive catastrophe response through ultra-high resolution vertical and oblique imagery within hours of a catastrophic event. This innovative approach to disaster response provides critical situational awareness to first-responders to help save lives and assist insurers to rapidly resolve claims for policyholders. Additionally, the GIC empowers underwriting through accurate, detailed and current geospatial imagery and analytics for insight into property condition to mitigate risk and reduce fraud.

Geollect

Catherine Gwilliam

Catherine Gwilliam is the CEO and Co-Founder of Geollect Limited, a geospatial intelligence company providing solutions to visualise, analyse and contextualise large, fragmented datasets using advanced automation methods. Geollect’s solutions provide powerful, actionable insights for decision support which have led to millions of dollars in savings for its clients. Prior to Geollect, Catherine served in the US Intelligence Community with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as a specialist embedded within the US Secret Service, US Navy Central Command and US Department of Homeland Security. She provided geospatial intelligence support to top level protective, military, diplomatic, and disaster relief operations as well as critical infrastructure protection missions. Many of her products are still used in US government workflows and they set the benchmark for all geospatial products in those specific mission areas.

Geollect

Ryan Lloyd

Dr. Ryan Lloyd is a Geospatial Intelligence Officer at Geollect, a geospatial intelligence company providing solutions to visualise, analyse and contextualise large, fragmented datasets using advanced automation methods. Geollect’s solutions provide powerful, actionable insights for decision support which have led to millions of dollars in savings for its clients. Ryan leads on Geollect’s data science and model development towards applications in a range of sectors, including insurance. Ryan has a PhD in geophysics and remote sensing, for which he applied cutting-edge analytical modelling and statistical analysis techniques to satellite based remote sensing data sets.

Esri UK

James Harvey

James is responsible for maintaining and growing Esri’s network of data partners to ensure customers have access to the correct spatial data to enable informed decision making. James has over a decade of experience working in the GIS industry and joined Esri UK in 2016. After graduating with a degree (BSc Hons) in Geology from the University of St Andrews, his passion for GIS data grew from working as an exploration geologist in Australia. Prior to Esri UK, James had customer facing roles at Hewlett Packard and Pitney Bowes and currently sits on the Ordnance Survey Customer Advisory Group.

HawkSight SRM Ltd

Paul Mercer

Paul founded HawkSight SRM after a career that includes both the UK Military and security risk consultancy in the middle east and Africa. His experience also includes work as a specialist investigator for HMCE and leading the field intelligence and analysis team which was responsible for brokering a peace agreement in Acheh, Indonesia. He is an active proponent of dovetailing enterprise security risk management (ESRM) with that of enterprise risk management (ERM) so that organisations – from global corporates to INGOs – can benefit from the adoption of a risk led approach to managing their physical security effectively. Something which is increasingly important as the nature of threat continues to change and homeland security considerations come to the forefront.

Esri

John Hendrickson

Solution Engineer, Hendrickson brings over 6 years of technical experience with Esri and the ArcGIS platform. Recently, he has focused on working with commercial customers to identify critical businesses challenges and works closely with the Esri team to provide technical consulting and conceptual solution design to clarify how GIS brings business value and solves problems.

Willis Towers Watson

Nigel Davis

Nigel currently leads the technology delivery of the client, risk and analytics proposition for the Corporate Risk and Broking segment. With a background in GIS, exposure and risk modelling, Nigel and his team build the analytical software products and platforms used by WTW employees and the risk management propositions offered to WTW customers.

Esri

Matthew Perry

As the Global Industry lead for Financial Services for Esri, Mr. Perry is responsible for working with major Insurance Companies, and Financial Institutions to envision a location strategy and deploy an associated location platform(s) within their business. He has been with Esri for 18 years, and previously led the implementation of Enterprise GIS system within the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

Esri

Alexander Martonik

Alexander Martonik M.S. is Esri’s Commercial Industry Specialist for corporate security and insurance, managing strategic initiatives in risk management and business continuity. Since 2015, Alexander has worked alongside Esri’s users from both governmental and commercial organizations. Alexander graduated with distinction from California State University San Bernardino’s post-graduate program in national cyber security studies, with dual certificates in GIS and intelligence methodology.

Mastercard

Ruth Polyblank

Ruth is Vice President and Partnerships Lead at Mastercard, working with a global team to identify new insurance opportunities, leveraging Mastercard’s existing capabilities and assets, and extending the reach for Enterprise Partnerships into new verticals. As a marketing and strategy expert within the insurance industry, Ruth holds over 19 years’ experience and has worked with successful Tech and Insurtech businesses to design insurance vertical propositions and growth strategies. Ruth previously held overall leadership and management responsibility for performance and growth of Chubb’s SME portfolio; using digital delivery and technology to create products for new and alternative markets. She has also held senior positions at CLS, EY and Fusion. As well as her professional accomplishments, Ruth is a regular speaker, author and mentor within the insurance sector, she co-authored ‘The InsurTech book’, was named by ‘WeAreTheCity’ a Top 50 Women in Tech 2018 and is also an Ambassador for the CII Insuring Women’s Futures programme.