Digital Asset alongside Blockchain Technology Partners and the Demex Group discussed how risk managers across a variety of industries are using the Daml application framework, Sextant infrastructure management platform, and other emerging technologies to support use cases in climate resiliency during a virtual event on May 12. Watch the webinar recording here.
The Demex Group provides a weather risk analysis platform for businesses managing their portfolio of assets (e.g. real estate and manufacturing). Customers submit weather data associated with the properties, supplies, manufacturing facilities, and any entity affected by weather-related events to the Demex platform, where a proprietary algorithm creates a probability distribution assessing the financial risk of a particular weather event.
Ken Konecki, Chief Technology Officer at the Demex Group, shared examples in snow removal for a property owner responsible for multiple properties. Konecki explained how property owners budget for contractors to support snow removal; however, snowfall patterns vary per region and determining where budgets need to be allocated to support adverse events is near impossible with current analytics and prediction platforms. Konecki stated that the Demex platform is able to bring all of the property data together, apply machine learning to the weather variables, and create a risk assessment for that property and the contractors so both entities are able to budget and plan revenues accordingly for any given fiscal year.
Konecki explained how the platform takes each location (owned by the property manager) independently, models the data associated with previous weather events, and assigns a risk value associated with that particular property. Once this value is determined, the Demex platform then creates a risk transfer policy, either in the form of insurance or the form of a financial derivative contract.
To enable this functionality, the Demex Group uses an instance of Hyperledger Sawtooth deployed and managed by Blockchain Technology Partner’s Sextant infrastructure management platform. Konecki stated, “One of our particular pain points was considering how to be reliable and scale. The answer to that turns out to be Sextant. Sextant allows us to deploy onto any Kubernetes cluster so we can scale, we can grow, and everything is reliable.”
The team at Demex then turned to Daml to create the different models of various contracts in a uniform and consistent manner (risk transfer policies in the form of insurance contracts or financial derivative contracts). The Demex Group chose Daml due to its flexibility.
“Daml is very agnostic to the data store underneath it. You can use a regular relational database all the way up to various blockchain solutions.” Konecki also stated how the trust and transparency made possible via the smart contract language enables automation of many types of complex processes that used to require manual intervention.
To learn more about how the Demex Group, Blockchain Technology Partners, and Digital Asset are coming together to provide climate resiliency for businesses across real estate, property management, insurance, and more, watch the recording here and access the latest news release here.