AkinovA has plans to partner with companies in the intellectual property space, its chief executive officer, Henri Winand, told Monte Carlo Today.

AkinovA provides a regulated electronic platform that enables the transfer and trading of global insurance and reinsurance risks, and insurance-linked securities. Winand co-founded the company in 2017 and, he stressed, it is “not a broker, not a carrier, but an insurance marketplace that is neutral and digital”.

It focuses largely on four pillars of risk. “The first pillar is climate and the energy transition because it’s been very close to capital markets for donkey’s years and there’s not enough capacity,” Winand explained.

“The second one is mortgage risk because mortgage reinsurance in particular is a combination of catastrophe and credit risk. Our third pillar is credit risk because that’s what a capital market does the whole day long.

“We are also proud to be able to do more intangibles, and cyber is part of the intangible product line.”

Intangibles are intelligent property (IP), he added. AkinovA is working with some large partners in that field although he is not at liberty to name them yet.

AkinovA is hearing the argument “in stereo” that there is a lucrative opportunity for re/insurers to support companies with IP that are seeking capital but finding it difficult with bank lenders.

Another intangible is cyber. Cyber risk analytics provider CyberCube has announced it is to partner with AkinovA, to enable AkinovA’s clients to benefit from CyberCube’s modelling and analytics.

Partnerships

Winand highlighted that, in 2020, AkinovA pioneered first-of-a-kind cloud outage and cyber-induced electricity power generation downtime risk transfers together with AkinovA ecosystem partners, including a leading broker and underwriting capital.

The partnership with CyberCube represents a significant milestone in AkinovA’s objective, he said, to bring new risks and capital to the risk transfer market.

“There is a lack of understanding around cyber risk in that you can model it, create a diversified portfolio and make money out of it. Being able to partner with, for instance, CyberCube (and others, as we are neutral) is very important for investors, but also to convey the message to brokers and underwriters that investors are willing to invest into simpler instruments, which are much clearer about when you are ‘on risk’ and when you are ‘off risk’, and what’s the minimum/maximum that you could be, and the most likely outcome,” Winand explained.

The re/insurance industry spends about $300 billion a year on IT systems, he said, and 99.9 percent of that is “on improving what they’ve got” and improving the way the parties speak with each other, but not necessarily on the way they work with their clients and capital.

“They all crave transparency and clarity but if you think from the insured all the way to the capital that buys shares in a listed insurance company, the information that is lost between them is immense,” he concluded.