Sydney-based natural catastrophe modelling startup Reask has earned a place in a UK management consultancy’s annual list of insurtechs that are well placed to serve the insurance industry globally.

London-based Oxbow Partners’ 2020 Insurtech Impact 25 list was compiled after a review of more than 100 companies “to find those that have “traction and potential for incumbents but are not household names”.

“We selected Reask – a relatively early-stage company – because of its highly experienced team, rapid progress and proposition,” Oxbow Partners says.

It says the natural catastrophe exposure modelling market is dominated by two players, and insurers and brokers would welcome more competition.

Sydney-based Reask is the first Australian company to be selected for the list.

Among its global successes is a project validating Axa’s internal models to provide greater transparency, and its probabilistic event response tool ForeCyc was used to assess the likelihood that Typhoon Faxai could hit Tokyo in September 2019.

“Reask’s founding team has deep domain expertise in nat cat modelling and high-performance computing,” the Impact 25 report for 2020 says. “Their hypothesis is that there are limitations in many existing models that can be strengthened with pattern recognition and simulation techniques from the field of machine learning.”

Reask initially focused on tropical cyclones and used Australia’s two largest research supercomputers to build its high-resolution model. Plans for this year include finding capital to support expansion into other atmospheric and oceanic perils such as drought and wildfire.

Oxbow says property and casualty insurers, reinsurers, intermediaries, securitised insurance funds and disaster risk financing sponsors should talk with Reask. “Large insurers regularly license several risk models to get different opinions on scenarios and this has allowed Reask to get some clients quickly and will allow them to fine-tune their proposition further.”

Another insurtech to make the list was San Francisco-based Socotra which has opened an office in Sydney and has a client list including Axa, Nationwide and IAG.