Paris-based parametric insurance specialists Descartes Underwriting is this month opening offices in Singapore and Australia as part of its international expansion.

Ben Qin will join as Head of North-East Asia and Australia, based in Sydney, while Robert Drysdale, previously at Howden, has been appointed Head of Southeast Asia.

Descartes says Mr Qin brings 14 years’ experience structuring and placing innovate alternative risk transfer solutions across the Asia-Pacific region, most recently at Marsh. Previously Mr Qin worked in actuarial and risk management roles.

The firm, which also has offices in New York, London and Houston, says it collaborates with brokers to protect their corporate and public sector clients against natural catastrophe and extreme weather exposures using covers designed to supplement gaps left by traditional insurance.

The parametric cover provides swift and direct payouts, with Descartes structured as a managing general agency “backed by a panel of tier-one risk carriers” and able to provide $US200 million ($272 million) in capacity per policy.

Descartes says that as a region, Asia-Pacific is more exposed to natural catastrophes and extreme weather events than others.

“Given this exposure and widening coverage gap, particularly in non-damage business interruption issues, with only 12% of the $US102 billion ($134 billion) nat cat driven economic losses reportedly insured in 2020, we believe this is a good time to bring Descartes’ parametric value-proposition to Asia-Pacific,” Mr Qin said.

Descartes was founded in 2018 by Tanguy Touffut, a former Axa executive, Sebastien Piguet and Kevin Dedieu.