Vantage Group Holdings Ltd., the Bermuda headquartered specialty insurance and reinsurance company, has made a key hire in the catastrophe modelling and research area, taking Steve Smith from QOMPLX as its new Head of Research & Development.
Vantage continues to build-out an impressive team as it comes up to one-year since its launch.
Smith is very well known in the catastrophe risk modelling and analytics arena of insurance and reinsurance, and has worked across banking, broking and underwriting companies in his roughly twenty-five year career.
He began his career in the mid-90’s working as a post-Doctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford with a focus on satellite sensing technologies.
He then shifted to thee banking area, working with equity derivatives at ING Barings and Commerzbank, before moving into his first role in the insurance and reinsurance market with ACE Tempest Re in Bermuda in the year 2000.
Smith then moved to broking house Carvill in 2004, where among other catastrophe modelling activities he helped to develop the Carvill Hurricane Index, which was the tropical storm related index used for trading hurricane futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).
He then spent some time at reinsurance brokers Willis Re, then TigerRisk partners and Beach, from 2009 through 2017, in senior cat modelling and research leadership roles.
In 2017 Smith joined QOMPLX, a start-up at the time, and led the insurance product development teams as the firm rolled out its modelling offerings.
He joins Vantage Risk this month as Head of Research & Development and his significant experience with be extremely valuable to the company, as it continues to build-out and expand its activities.
Smith has specific expertise in leveraging analytics to inform and facilitate hedging of risks, which may read across Vantage’s own balance-sheet offerings, as well as its insurance-linked securities (ILS) activities.
