Q
What is Oasis?
A
Oasis is a not-for-profit company that provides software and supports a community to stimulate innovation and choice in the analysis and interpretation of catastrophic risk.
The framework of Oasis defines the way in which hazard, damage, exposure and insurance policy data can be combined to calculate exposure to catastrophes.
Q
Who are the members?
A
There are 23 insurance and reinsurance companies and brokerages that are the founding members and owners of Oasis. In addition, we have associate members that are a range of technology firms specializing in hazard and extreme events and flood modeling along with other types of providers of front-end and back-end systems.
Q
How did it come about?
A
It was built from pent-up demand from the global insurance and reinsurance community, which felt that the current paradigm wasn’t giving them what they wanted and they needed some change. That was the real driver behind it.
Q
Why use an open-source model?
A
There are a small number of organizations that are operating in our space, but really no new entrants into this marketplace have been successful since 1994. We decided it was time to have an intervention that was going to solve some key issues that were faced by the insurance and reinsurance community. Our motivation was let’s solve a problem, let’s increase the transparency of the marketplace, let’s bring new entrants into the marketplace, let’s build this plug-and-play platform. The open community is a good one if you want to build a sustainable long-term innovation framework that’s going to create change and drive innovation.
The most important thing about Oasis is not necessarily that it’s open source but that it’s interoperable. The interoperability is absolutely fundamental. We had to design something that could run on any platform, any system with any type of data and any type of model. Designing interoperability was easily the hardest thing to do, and it’s easily the most important thing to do because that’s what allows for adoption by different people in different countries with different businesses and different systems.
Q
How does Oasis drive innovation?
A
Whilst Oasis has this not-for-profit status, we think it’s fundamental that the ecosystem around Oasis be absolutely for profit. By providing this plug-and-play software, we enable this large global community of academics and businesses to offer services that historically they weren’t able to provide. It was a closed system that required too many skills in one place for almost any organization to be able to provide, which is why there were barriers to entry. By doing some of the hard parts for this community, we enabled the other ones to offer services and make money.
