For Immediate Release:
Fermat Selects AIR's Touchstone to Manage Insurance-Linked Securities
BOSTON, Sept. 4, 2014 - Catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide (AIR) today announced that Fermat Capital Management, a specialty investment management firm and one of the largest investors in catastrophe bonds, has implemented AIR's Touchstone® platform to perform more detailed modeling on its catastrophe-related financial instruments. Fermat has licensed AIR's CATRADER® since 2008 and this announcement marks the evolution of catastrophe modeling solutions for the ILS market. AIR is a Verisk Analytics (Nasdaq:VRSK) business.
"We pride ourselves on being the first investment management company to use a detailed policy-level modeling solution from AIR to better manage our portfolio of insurance-linked securities (ILS)," said John Seo, co-founder and managing principal at Fermat. "Through Touchstone, our access to granular, detailed policy-level exposures will be analyzed to provide a richer, more robust set of detailed catastrophe risk insight. Further, Touchstone will seamlessly integrate with our own proprietary CatAPM price model for use in continuous-time trading and portfolio optimization of ILS."
In July 2014, AIR released Version 2.0 of Touchstone, which is rapidly being deployed throughout the industry and opening new opportunities for detailed modeling by ILS investors.
"Touchstone offers a suite of tools for asset managers like Fermat to truly understand and own the risk, while providing the flexibility, transparency, and performance needed to manage catastrophe risk in the current business environment," said Rob Newbold, senior vice president at AIR Worldwide. "As many asset managers find attractive opportunities in the broader space that give them access to detailed exposure data, Touchstone allows them to perform detailed loss analysis of that exposure. They can better understand and interact with global exposure data from a high-level overview all the way down to the street level, and with dramatic performance improvements over previous catastrophe modeling solutions."
Newbold continued, "In addition to catastrophe loss analysis, Touchstone offers tools that give asset managers access to exposure data quality assessment, high resolution hazard visualizations, and robust geospatial analytics. Those tools provide significant analytical power in today's market. And with Touchstone's open platform, asset managers can be confident knowing that Touchstone will evolve to meet their needs no matter how the market changes."
About Fermat Capital Management
Fermat Capital Management, LLC is a specialty investment management firm founded in Westport, Connecticut in 2001. With over US$5 billion in assets under management as of 31 July 2014, Fermat Capital manages institutional portfolios of Insurance-Linked Securities (ILS) with a particular emphasis on catastrophe bonds. As a complementary overlay to its long only, fundamental value approach to investing, the firm develops and employs an active trading strategy supported by proprietary systems that adapt and consolidate traditional insurance industry risk estimation models for the continuous-time trading of ILS.
About AIR Worldwide
AIR Worldwide (AIR) is the scientific leader and most respected provider of risk modeling software and consulting services. AIR founded the catastrophe modeling industry in 1987 and today models the risk from natural catastrophes and terrorism in more than 90 countries. More than 400 insurance, reinsurance, financial, corporate, and government clients rely on AIR software and services for catastrophe risk management, insurance-linked securities, detailed site-specific wind and seismic engineering analyses, and agricultural risk management. AIR, a Verisk Analytics (Nasdaq:VRSK) business, is headquartered in Boston with additional offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, please visit www.air-worldwide.com.
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For more information, contact:
Kevin Long
AIR Worldwide
+1-617-267-6645
klong@air-worldwide.com