How Catastrophe Models Work and Where They Fall Short With Anil Vasagiri

2026 Hurricane Season: Risk, Markets, Models

This is the audio recording of our June 11 panel on the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season — three people who actually price this risk for a living, in conversation for an hour. The ground they cover: where the cat models miss, how the ILS market is pricing the 2026 season, and how a new prediction-market contract could change what it means to "test" a hurricane model.

Ebola, Statistics, and What Pandemic Science Can Teach Markets

The Democratic Republic of Congo is in the middle of its 17th Ebola outbreak since 1976 and the WHO has declared a public health emergency of international concern. There are no approved vaccines. No approved treatments. Hundreds of suspected cases emerged before the outbreak was even confirmed. And the surveillance infrastructure needed to track it is operating in an active conflict zone. For reinsurers and ILS investors, pandemic risk has always been the peril that's hardest to model, hardest to price, and hardest to transfer. The triggers don't work and the data is noisy.. And the market has largely walked away from the problem since COVID. My guest today has spent his career working on exactly that problem from the science side. Dr. Ben Swallow is a lecturer in statistics at the University of St. Andrews, where he works at the intersection of Bayesian inference, uncertainty quantification, and epidemic modeling. He co-led the uncertainty quantification effort for the Scottish government during COVID. He's worked on Ebola outbreak analysis in West Africa. And he's currently part of the Isaac Newton Institute's program on pandemic preparedness. Subscribe to Risk Market News [https://www.riskmarketnews.com/]

Wildfire's Garbage-In Problem With Brian Bastian

California’s homeowners insurance market, backed by privae capital, is still in retreat. The publicly-backed FAIR Plan is financial buckling. And somewhere in the gap between what the cat models capture and what's actually happening on the ground at the property level, there's a mispricing problem that nobody has fully solved yet. In this episode of The Risky Science Podcast that wraps up my series of conversations from ClimateTech Connect in Washington this past April, I talk with Brian Bastian, Head of Product at Green Shield Risk Solutions — the analytics and MGA operation that's betting mitigation-first underwriting is the answer the admitted market can't quite get to yet.  Subscribe to Risk Market News [https://www.riskmarketnews.com/]

Modeling Every Risk for Every Client with Willis' Ben Fidlow

Ben Fidlow is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and leads analytics and risk advisory at Willis. In this episode, he explains how brokerage modeling differs fundamentally from carrier or vendor modeling — it's about what risk means to a specific client, not an aggregate book. He walks through Willis's expanded partnership with Moody's RMS, which lets his team layer their own climate extrapolations on top of current-day model outputs while retaining the ability to explain every step to clients. He also shares where he thinks AI is creating its most immediate value (converting unstructured client data into structured formats at scale), why federal data erosion is a real near-term problem, and what it would take for a direct capital market risk marketplace to eventually disintermediate both insurers and brokers. Subscribe to Risk Market New [https://www.riskmarketnews.com/]

The Wrong Model for the Wrong Job With Roy Wright

In this episode of Risky Science, recorded at ClimateTech Connect in April, IBHS CEO Roy Wright breaks down why catastrophe models were never designed to price individual risk, why mitigation only works at the neighborhood level, and why insurance markets start to fail when price signals drift away from underlying risk.