Swiss Re is going into partnership with the organisation Schadenorganisation Erdbeben (SOE).
The partnership will see the reinsurance giant work with SOE to develop needed IT infrastructure around earthquake resilience. The SOE is a public-private partnership of Switzerland’s cantonal authorities, cantonal building insurers, and private insurers founded a year ago to increase resilience around earthquakes in the country.
According to a statement from Swiss Re, the mission of the SOE is to assess all damage to buildings as quickly as possible after an earthquake so that no unnecessary time is lost until reconstruction can be carried out. Orchestrating the assessment requires sophisticated and reliable IT systems.
The new IT system that will be developed through the partnership, said Swiss Re, will consist of a platform that provides the required building and earthquake event information, and facilitates the dispatching of damage assessors. It will also include a mobile application to support the experts on site, allowing for all the important information for the calculation of repair and reconstruction costs to be made
Ivo Menzinger, head of EMEA public sector solutions for Swiss Re, said: “Swiss Re is proud to have been selected by SOE to support it with the creation of a claims organisation that functions throughout Switzerland. This undertaking will make an important contribution to enhancing resilience in Switzerland.”
Switzerland suffers from frequent, minor earthquakes. According to the Swiss Seismological Service (SED) in Zurich, the country sees between 1,000 and 1,500 earthquakes a year. It says that based on the long-term average, 23 quakes with a magnitude above 2.5 or above occur each year. The SED says that it records around three-to-four earthquakes each day in Switzerland and its neighbouring countries. It predicts that there is a 1% chance of a catastrophic earthquake with a magnitude of six occurring in the next year, with a major earthquake happening every fifty-to-one-hundred-and-fifty years.
