Risk Management
Augment Risk | December 04, 2023
Augment Risk, the pioneering new reinsurance brokerage firm, today announced the arrival of Andrew Matson as Chief Executive Officer. Matson will build on Augment Risk’s significant traction, having already bound $1 billion of premium in its first year of business. Augment Risk’s initial success is a testament to the firm’s transformative ‘Client, not class of business’ approach that protects and grows client equity value.
“Augment Risk was founded to address a fundamental structural problem in the insurance and reinsurance markets. We champion the need for a shift from outdated practices of ‘products sold at prices’ to better cater to our clients’ needs,” Matson said. “I am thrilled to work with some of the most exceptional talent in the industry. We believe we can transform reinsurance broking for the better by focusing on our client’s entire business, creating partnerships with reinsurers, and enhancing equity value by better managing capital, reducing earnings volatility, and expanding the margins of our clients. Our approach has never been done at this scale.”
The reinsurance industry has remained unchanged for generations. But with the advent of an increased interest rate environment, the rise in loss cost through inflation, and challenges mounting from natural catastrophes, the need to manage capital more efficiently has never been more important. Augment Risk has implemented a numerical approach to help clients better utilize their capital to maintain or improve their financial strength while achieving their business goals.
At the heart of Augment Risk’s approach is a relentless focus on the client’s balance sheet, where capital has been blocked from being put to its best use due to operational complexity, vertical barriers, and mismanagement of risks. Augment Risk unlocks this opportunity by managing volatility through tailored solutions that are meticulously crafted to optimize enterprise value and are agnostic toward all forms of capital—a key differentiation from the conventional one-size-fits-all approach.
Matson’s deep experience and understanding of the challenges facing reinsurers’ businesses are key to executing the vision of Augment Risk’s groundbreaking broker model. His accomplishments in the industry have spanned the globe and brought billions of dollars of premium to the global reinsurance market.
“Andrew has the experience and conviction to lead Augment Risk’s next chapter of growth, and we are pleased to welcome him as CEO,” said Sam Gaynor, Managing Director, Altamont Capital Partners, which announced $100 million in funding for Augment Risk earlier this year. “Augment Risk addresses a clear market need to help global customers manage complex risk capital challenges based on efficiency, with a model poised to transform the reinsurance industry.”
“Augment Risk provides the depth and breadth of expertise to ensure leaders of global companies have the capital, tools, and strategic insights necessary to thrive in a complex, often volatile environment; a one-size-fits-all approach to reinsurance doesn’t work and isn’t always in the best interest of their businesses,” said Keoni Schwartz, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Altamont Capital Partners. “This puts Augment Risk in a completely different category of reinsurance, building a new market in the industry to deliver better outcomes for these businesses.”
About Augment Risk
Augment Risk is a risk capital and reinsurance solutions broker, focused on designing and placing bespoke protections for a variety of clients. With a wide range of solutions, Augment creates growth and equity value through tailored transactions to deliver long-term capital and partnerships. Augment Risk’s expertise extends beyond (re)insurance, allowing the company to disrupt the value chain and build creative, value-accretive solutions for individual client needs.
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Insurance Technology
PR Newswire | October 05, 2023
MongoDB, Inc. (NASDAQ: MDB) today at MongoDB.local Boston, announced the launch of MongoDB Atlas for Healthcare and MongoDB Atlas for Insurance, two new initiatives that help companies in these industries accelerate their pace of innovation and better serve end-users with modern, data-driven applications. MongoDB Atlas for Healthcare and MongoDB Atlas for Insurance include expert-led innovation workshops, tailored technology partnerships, and industry-specific knowledge accelerators to provide customized training paths designed for a range of use cases that developers in these industries work with. To learn more about MongoDB Atlas for Industries, visit https://www.mongodb.com/industries.
Organizations in the healthcare and insurance industries depend on large volumes of highly sensitive data to make critical decisions about patient care and coverage policies for customers. However, these industries face challenges not only from legacy applications that rely on siloed data, but also complex networks of providers and organizations. These constraints prevent them from realizing the full potential of their data, said Boris Bialek, Field CTO of Industry Solutions at MongoDB. With the launch of MongoDB Atlas for Healthcare and MongoDB Atlas for Insurance, we're alleviating these challenges by providing organizations with the tools required to build modern applications that increase operational efficiency and productivity. Deploying modern applications with MongoDB can help increase interoperability across entire enterprises that enable healthcare organizations to harness real-time patient insights and build personalized care pathways, and for insurers to capitalize on AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics to modernize their underwriting and claims processes.
MongoDB Atlas for Healthcare and MongoDB Atlas for Insurance include solutions and capabilities that can help organizations reimagine how they interact with end users by deploying data-driven applications with the flexibility, security, and resilience the healthcare and insurance industries require:
Migrate and modernize legacy applications with minimal risk and zero downtime: For organizations in the healthcare and insurance industries that want to move from legacy relational databases to modern applications on MongoDB Atlas, MongoDB Relational Migrator reduces the time, cost, and risk typically associated with these projects–making it significantly faster and easier to optimize operations and accelerate innovation. MongoDB Relational Migrator analyzes legacy databases, automatically generates new data schema and code to operate migrated applications, and then executes a seamless migration to MongoDB Atlas with no downtime required. Organizations can run the migrated, modernized application in a testing environment before deploying to production to ensure it is optimized and performing as intended. MongoDB Relational Migrator provides companies in the healthcare and insurance industries with the flexibility to move to MongoDB Atlas quickly and efficiently, so they can focus on building and shipping world-class applications.
Protect sensitive data throughout applications: With MongoDB Queryable Encryption, healthcare and insurance organizations can ensure full-lifecycle encryption of sensitive data—including patient records, medical histories, and insurance claims—not only in-transit over networks and at-rest during storage, but also while data is in use during querying. MongoDB Queryable Encryption provides state-of-the-art encryption that helps reduce data exfiltration and operational risk with an easy-to-use capability organizations can use to secure highly sensitive workloads with no cryptography expertise required. With MongoDB Queryable Encryption, developers in these industries working with highly sensitive information can protect their data throughout its entire lifecycle when being stored, queried, and processed on MongoDB.
Run data-driven applications anywhere: MongoDB Atlas for the Edge enables organizations to deploy applications closer to where real-time data is generated, processed and stored, across mobile and IoT devices, on-premises servers, and multiple major cloud providers. For example, healthcare providers can seamlessly deploy applications across mobile devices and on-premises servers for interacting with patients and accessing medical records when internet connectivity is unavailable—while also ensuring data is synchronized with the cloud once connectivity is available. Insurance companies can also deploy applications across mobile devices for use cases that simplify underwriting, claims processing, and build new cross-industry products and services. MongoDB Atlas for the Edge enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage applications that are accessible virtually anywhere without the complexity typically associated with operating distributed applications at the edge.
Reimagine possibilities with innovation workshops: Both MongoDB Atlas for Healthcare and MongoDB Atlas for Insurance include dedicated executive engagement with industry experts from MongoDB and the MongoDB Partner Ecosystem to ideate client-specific solutions using best practices developed through proven industry experience. Healthcare and insurance innovation workshops are tailored to address the unique challenges and opportunities that these organizations face so they can modernize their operations with security and compliance in mind.
Jumpstart application development: With MongoDB Atlas for Healthcare and MongoDB Atlas for Insurance, organizations can engage with the MongoDB Professional Services team to take advantage of healthcare and insurance expertise and accelerate projects from concept to prototype to production in less time. Experts from the MongoDB Professional Services team can work backward from an organization's specific challenges to conduct architectural reviews, and help quickly prototype proofs of concept for ideation before moving new applications to production.
Upskill teams to quickly build modern applications: MongoDB Atlas for Healthcare and MongoDB Atlas for Insurance provide tailored MongoDB University courses and learning materials, including unlimited access to curated webinars and solutions sessions, to help developers learn how to quickly build modern applications for the healthcare and insurance fields. Organizations can benefit from training new and experienced developers from the ground up on how to build modern, data-driven applications to modernize operations and reimagine end user experiences.
To get started with MongoDB Atlas for Healthcare, visit https://www.mongodb.com/industries/healthcare, and to get started with MongoDB Atlas for Insurance, visit https://www.mongodb.com/industries/insurance.
GE HealthCare is a leader in precision care, infusing innovation with patient-focused technologies to enable better care. "GE Healthcare turned to MongoDB to manage the lifecycle of our IoT devices, from deployment to retirement," said Emir Biser, Senior Data Architect at GE HealthCare. "MongoDB Atlas is a gamechanger. This technology stack is helping us streamline commercialization and bring market-ready solutions to deliver advanced healthcare. Some of the recent tests resulted in an 83% decrease in retrieval time for critical data elements."
Inovaare Corporation is a leading provider of AI-powered compliance automation solutions for healthcare payers. "Recognizing the significance of compliance in today's healthcare environment, Inovaare sought a solution that could not only help navigate the intricacies of this domain but also bring forth profound industry expertise into the mix," said Mohar Mishra, CTO and Co-Founder at Inovaare Corporation. "MongoDB Atlas fortifies our data infrastructure and enables streamlined data processing for robust analytics and reporting capabilities. Additionally, we rely on MongoDB Atlas Vector Search to deliver context-aware compliance guidance and real-time data-driven insights. MongoDB has been instrumental in helping us consistently deliver state-of-the-art compliance solutions that empower healthcare payers."
Redcliffe Labs is India's fastest-growing omnichannel diagnostics service provider focussing on providing quality-led conclusive diagnostics to Indian citizens. "We have been working constantly to improve customer experiences and convenience by embracing innovative technologies," said Prabhat Pankaj, Chief Technology Officer at Redcliffe Labs. "To achieve that goal, we have leveraged the adaptable document database model of MongoDB Atlas to power our Smart Health Report, a resource that summarizes a range of indicators and trackers along with health tips, and dietary recommendations to evaluate holistic health. We are confident that this partnership will enable us to provide our customers with effective services."
Helvetia is one of the largest Swiss insurance companies, serving over 7 million personal and corporate customers across Europe. "Insurance policies are composed of many diverse attributes, while customer data is hierarchically structured. Trying to fit these flexible structures into rigid rows and columns of a relational database would add a lot of friction to our developers," said Daniel Maier, Lead Solution Architect at Helvetia. "MongoDB Atlas Search is blazing fast! We can surface relevant results from data sets with tens of millions of documents in around 15ms. Atlas Search has also given us a cleaner and simpler architecture. We can create new indexes in a single API call, and data is automatically synced between the database and search index, giving consistent, high quality query results. Developer and operational overhead is reduced, creating cost and time savings which we can reinvest back into building products for our customers."
About MongoDB Atlas for Industries
MongoDB for Healthcare and MongoDB Atlas for Insurance are both part of MongoDB Atlas for Industries, a program that helps organizations accelerate cloud adoption and modernization by leveraging industry-specific expertise, programs, partnerships, and integrated solutions. To get started with MongoDB Atlas for Industries, visit mongodb.com/industries.
About MongoDB Atlas
MongoDB Atlas is the leading multi-cloud developer data platform that accelerates and simplifies building applications with data. MongoDB Atlas provides an integrated set of data and application services in a unified environment that enables development teams to quickly build with the performance and scale modern applications require. Tens of thousands of customers and millions of developers worldwide rely on MongoDB Atlas every day to power their business-critical applications. To get started with MongoDB Atlas, visit mongodb.com/atlas.
About MongoDB
Headquartered in New York, MongoDB's mission is to empower innovators to create, transform, and disrupt industries by unleashing the power of software and data. Built by developers, for developers, our developer data platform is a database with an integrated set of related services that allow development teams to address the growing requirements for today's wide variety of modern applications, all in a unified and consistent user experience. MongoDB has tens of thousands of customers in over 100 countries. The MongoDB database platform has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times since 2007, and there have been millions of builders trained through MongoDB University courses. To learn more, visit mongodb.com.
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Core Insurance
PR Newswire | October 03, 2023
NSM Insurance Group, a global specialty insurance provider with more than $1.6B in premium across 25+ niche insurance programs, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Envisage International. Based in Neptune Beach, Fla., Envisage is a leading provider of global health and travel insurance plans for international students and cultural exchange participants around the world.
"The travel insurance market is booming and will continue to grow at a rapid pace — with the industry predicted to reach $41B by 2027. We plan to seize this market opportunity and become a dominant player in the space," said Bill McKernan, President of NSM Insurance Group. "Envisage is a market leader in international education and cultural exchange insurance with a talented team, strong customer base, established revenue relationships and cutting-edge technology infrastructure. They are an enterprising addition to our portfolio as we look to build our footprint in the international health and travel insurance space."
Envisage offers a wide range of international health and travel medical insurance products through its two brands, International Student Insurance (ISI) and Envisage Global Insurance (EGI). ISI serves colleges, universities, ESL programs, study abroad programs, students, teachers and scholars with A+ rated plans and best-in-class resources. EGI is the leading provider of group insurance plans to organizations in the J1 cultural exchange and global youth travel market, offering unparalleled service and custom-built technology to its clients around the world.
"We're absolutely thrilled to join forces with NSM to help us continue to grow and scale the business," said Keith Clausen, President of Envisage International. "Over the last two decades, our dedicated and talented team has helped us grow into the force we are today, and we look forward to extending that growth with NSM. NSM has the prowess and proven track record to help ISI and EGI grow by expanding our distribution channels, further enhancing our technology platforms and expanding our global market reach."
Over the past 33 years, NSM has developed a winning formula for building the industry's most successful and sustainable insurance programs, consistently outperforming competitors and driving industry-leading growth and profitability over the last four years. This latest acquisition complements NSM's robust portfolio of specialty insurance programs and brands for the commercial P&C industry and consumer insurance — backed by the company's state-of-the-art resources, including IT, operations, marketing, HR and finance.
For more information about NSM or for investment opportunities, please visit nsminc.com.
About NSM Insurance Group
NSM Insurance Group is a global specialty insurance provider, exclusively focused on building successful insurance programs. For more than 30 years, NSM has been committed to delivering industry-specific insurance programs that help agents meet the unique needs of their customers and fuel market growth through innovative development, underwriting, distribution and claims expertise. The company has built more than $1.6 billion in premium across 25+ specialty insurance programs and brands around the world focused on collector cars; pets; social services and behavioral health; addiction treatment; coastal condominiums; towing and garage; trucking; sports and fitness; professional liability for contractors, architects and engineers; habitational; general contractors; medical stop loss and managed care; staffing; and workers' compensation. For more information on NSM, visit nsminc.com.
About Envisage International
Envisage International Corporation specializes in international health and travel insurance under its two key brands, International Student Insurance (ISI) and Envisage Global Insurance (EGI). With more than 20 years of experience, we take a consultative approach to helping our clients understand their insurance needs, creating customized solutions and providing support every step of the way. With offices in the United States, Mexico, China and Europe, Envisage is well placed to help organizations around the world with their international insurance needs. You can find more information about Envisage, ISI and EGI at envisageinternational.com
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