(upbeat music)
-: Hi, I am Ellie, the Curious Geographer.
This episode of "The Curious Geographer"
is brought to you in collaboration with Time for Geography
and presented in partnership with Verisk.
Last episode, we met Shane Latchman,
Vice President and Managing Director at Verisk.
Verisk collects and analyses data
to help businesses and communities
understand and manage risks such as natural disasters.
They use technology such as GIS
to turn data into smart insights,
helping to make the world a safer place.
In this episode, we are taking a deep dive
into the career of catastrophe modelling.
What does a career in this industry look like?
What geographical skills are used?
And if you are interested in this career,
how do you get there?
So let's dive straight in.
Welcome, Shane.
Can you start by telling us what is your role at Verisk
and can you give us an overview of the company?
-: Thanks, Ellie, great to be here.
So in my role at Verisk,
I am Vice President and Managing Director
of the Extreme Events Solutions Business Unit
within Verisk's London office.
And what Verisk is doing is we do many things.
A big part of it is what you said before,
which is essentially taking data
and coming up with insights from that data.
But really what we're doing
is we're focusing on that from an insurance angle.
And within the Extreme Events Solutions Business Unit,
a large part of what we are doing
is analysing the risk from natural catastrophes
for the insurance industry.
As part of my role specifically,
I am Managing Director
and get involved in many different things.
So one is interacting with regulators and rating agencies,
so people like Lloyd's of London or the Bank of England.
And they are of course quite interested in disasters,
since that's quite important
in terms of financial stability,
at least for the insurance sector.
The second thing I do
is working to support our sales functions
in large parts of Europe.
So anything from Turkish and Israeli earthquake
to Italian floods to French hail to UK windstorms,
really looking at the range of perils
across the different parts of Europe.
And then finally another part of my role
is bringing manmade catastrophe solutions
to the insurance industry,
things like strikes, riots, and civil commotion.
-: It's quite broad.
What does a typical work day look like for you
and which geographical skills do you use?
Now I'm just going to start by saying,
and I know that you'll mention this,
that you're not a geographer,
but you do work with lots of geographers.
In fact, you are actually a mathematician.
But from your knowledge and working with geographers,
what skills do you use in your career?
-: So I'll start with a typical workday.
So as you mentioned there, it's obviously quite broad,
the number of things that I'm doing.
The easiest way to summarise it is just lots of meetings.
So that's a big part of my job.
I think meetings are much maligned.
People may say, oh you know, I have another meeting.
But I think meetings when they're done well
are really engaging.
The way I see it, an email is finite,
but a conversation is infinite.
So if you prepare for that conversation well,
you can get a lot of great insights from both parties.
And so that's a large part of what I'm doing,
meeting with regulators and rating agencies
and also insurers and reinsurers
and a range of different stakeholders,
including internally as well.
In terms of geographical skills,
of course GIS is a big part of catastrophe modelling.
An example is early in 2025,
there were these wildfires in California,
quite devastating wildfires.
Part of what our insured clients need to do,
understand very quickly
how much exposure do they have to that wildfire?
What the total amount that they could lose, for example,
or what the likely amount that they will lose.
And that requires GIS skills to do that.
Another example is it's really important
to ensure that our models account
with climate change that's already happened.
And so climate change is a big part of what we do,
ensuring that any trends that we find
are included into the models to potentially rebase them
when those trends are found.
And then finally, another example
is if we're looking at strikes, riots, and civil commotion,
what I mentioned there,
and they're looking to see
what is the most likely places that it can happen.
A lot of the downscaling and insights comes
using geographical data
such as economic data, population data and so on,
a lot of which involves geographical skills.
-: Brilliant.
And I know you mentioned GIS, and a lot of students
start to use the skills of GIS in school.
So it's really interesting to see,
if you're interested in GIS,
what a career actually using the software can do
and how it can impact lives around the world.
So what inspired you to do this career
and how did you get started?
-: It's an interesting story.
So as you mentioned, I studied maths,
studied actuarial science.
And whilst I was studying,
I was doing a lot of maths that was connected to finance.
And at some point,
I started thinking in certain branches of finance,
it was very hard to prove that what you were doing was true.
And that was a big part of it.
I wanted to be involved in something
that I was reasonably certain was true.
And I remembered when I was 16, back in Trinidad,
studying a-level physics,
and there was an experiment with a ball.
And you take this ball, you drop the ball,
the ball bounces, and it comes back up to a certain height.
And you can estimate how high this ball would bounce
if you knew the coefficient of elasticity of that ball.
It's very simple.
But what it said was that you could predict the results.
There was an element of predictability,
and that, to me, said that science
had an element of predictability in it.
And so I identified that I wanted to get involved
in something to do with science.
And I came across catastrophe modelling in my studies,
and so I decided to do my dissertation on the topic.
I was able to wangle an invite to a conference
that Verisk were doing at the time.
And then I met some senior people.
I asked them to help me with my dissertation,
and the rest is history.
-: Wow, so Verisk was quite early on
in terms of when you were doing your dissertation,
in terms of your world of careers,
which is quite interesting how you start talking to people
and find similarities of your interests.
-: Exactly. -: What advice would you give
to a student listening
who's looking to start a career in catastrophe modelling?
-: So whenever I get asked,
what are you looking for when you are interviewing?
I always say three things.
The first is reasoning ability,
the second is curiosity,
and the third is interpersonal skills.
And I'll just explain why.
So the reasonability, so we are in London,
and London is a very client-facing office.
And what we are doing
is we are getting asked by our clients questions,
and we need to answer those questions.
And sometimes those questions are quite hard,
and they require a lot of reasoning ability
to understand, well first off,
why is the client asking this question,
how do I solve this question, and so on.
That's why reasoning is really important.
And the second is curiosity.
Curiosity is because catastrophe remodelling is so big.
You keep digging, and you're digging, and you're digging.
This is my 17th year.
You never reach the bottom.
No matter how long you do it,
it is very deep and it's very broad.
So curiosity is important because it's good to be curious
and want to know why is this thing this way,
and therefore that helps to just from yourself
expand your overall knowledge,
and then your value to the company
and the clients and so forth.
And the third thing I tell them is interpersonal skills.
Interpersonal skills are important
for team working of course,
but also, as we are a client-facing office
and we meet our clients in London very often,
it's important to have good interpersonal skills,
'cause of course you're going to be engaging
with that client in an engaging way.
I think the other thing I would say
is that if you're thinking about what you can do
in terms of background before getting into cat modelling,
those three things are really more soft skills.
Certainly anything to do with coding skills is quite useful.
Things like Python, things like things like R, Excel skills,
if you could do an Excel course is really,
really quite useful.
Anything that gives you a good background
of statistics and insurance is also useful.
And of course, all those geographical concepts
you'll be using from day to day
across all the natural hazards,
the climate change part, GIS, et cetera,
they're all very useful within cat modelling.
-: Brilliant.
And we have a few students,
I know I teach a few students
who absolutely love the physical geography side,
love looking at natural disasters,
but are also quite scientific,
they do a lot of those STEM subjects.
So it really does seem like it's a really good link,
as geography is between many different subjects,
and drawing interests together.
-: Definitely.
-: Thank you so much for joining us, Shane.
It was fascinating to hear
about a career in catastrophe modelling
and the work that you do as well and how you got there.
So thank you for being a guest on "The Curious Geographer".