SAS, a global leader in data and AI, and Swiss Re, a leading global reinsurance provider, have announced a strategic partnership aimed at helping insurers strengthen resilience through AI-driven risk intelligence and advanced actuarial decisioning.

Under the partnership, Swiss Re has joined the SAS Strategic Technology Partner Program and will integrate its CatNet natural catastrophe risk intelligence — a platform that combines satellite imagery, hazard maps, and geospatial event data — with the SAS Insurance Life Cycle Accelerator. The combined solution enables insurers to embed predictive hazard insights directly into underwriting, pricing, and portfolio management workflows.

"Insurers cannot rely solely on historical loss data to understand risk," said Stu Bradley, Senior Vice President for Risk, Fraud and Compliance Solutions at SAS. "The combination of SAS' AI and actuarial modeling capabilities with Swiss Re's catastrophe intelligence will enable insurers to make faster, more transparent and more resilient underwriting and pricing decisions."

Secondary Perils Drive Urgency

As climate-driven events grow in frequency and severity, insurers face intensifying pressure from so-called "secondary perils" — events such as floods, hailstorms, and wildfires that individually cause less severe damage than primary perils like hurricanes and major earthquakes but collectively generate substantial aggregate losses. Historically, secondary perils have received less attention in catastrophe modeling than their primary counterparts, making their growing financial impact particularly difficult for insurers to assess and price. According to the Swiss Re Institute — the research and thought leadership arm of Swiss Re — 99.9% of insured catastrophe losses in the United States in 2025 originated from secondary peril events, highlighting the escalating importance of managing these risks.

"Secondary perils are not secondary in terms of their financial impact," said Ali Shahkarami, Head of Risk Data Solutions Insurance at Swiss Re. "Insurers need the ability to understand how risk is evolving across portfolios and geographies in near-real time. Together, Swiss Re and SAS are enabling carriers to integrate catastrophe intelligence directly into underwriting and actuarial decision-making so they can better anticipate risk, close protection gaps and build more sustainable portfolios."

Combined Solution Capabilities

The integrated offering provides insurers with several key capabilities:

• Data integration: Users can access high-resolution CatNet natural catastrophe data directly within existing SAS workflows through secure APIs and geocoding. Hazard intelligence is embedded into actuarial and underwriting workflows without requiring manual data manipulation.
• Automated decisioning: Real-time model scoring powered by machine learning incorporates current hazard information and event notifications. Enriched decision intelligence is automated for pricing, rating, and underwriting. Model scores are unified with business rules, and champion-challenger strategies operate within guardrails for profit-loss ratio, fairness, and compliance.
• Portfolio risk steering: Insurers can better understand concentration risk, assess portfolio impacts, and perform "what-if" analyses across geographies and perils.
• Operational efficiencies: SAS and Swiss Re project a 95% increase in decisioning efficiency and a 50% efficiency improvement in the modeling process.
• Volume growth: Underwriting teams will be able to review 40% more risks with the same staffing levels, generating both top- and bottom-line impact.
• Governance and auditability: Governed, explainable AI workflows support regulatory and operational transparency. A unified, cloud-native approach replaces fragmented spreadsheet logic, ensuring full lineage, visibility, and audit control from exposure data through final rate deployment.

Broader Industry Implications

The partnership reflects a wider industry shift toward insurance operations that combine AI, advanced analytics, catastrophe intelligence, and human expertise to support more agile decision-making. Catastrophe risk modeling has traditionally been the domain of specialized firms such as Moody's RMS and Verisk, and the integration of Swiss Re's hazard intelligence into SAS's actuarial and decisioning platform represents a notable convergence between geospatial catastrophe data and end-to-end insurance analytics. The collaboration also speaks to a persistent industry challenge: the global protection gap between economic losses and insured losses from natural disasters, which continues to leave substantial costs borne by governments, businesses, and households.

"The future of the insurance industry will be led by enterprises embracing the concept of 'new collar,'" said Franklin Manchester, Principal Global Insurance Advisor at SAS. "Insurance professionals collaborating with AI agents to bring agility to decision making will be the hallmark of leaders — and the bane of laggards — when the dust settles."

SAS and Swiss Re, together with Definity, will host a free webinar titled "Sustainable Property Pricing for Today and Tomorrow in an Evolving Natural Catastrophe Landscape." Experts from all three organizations will discuss the rise of secondary perils driven by climate change, sustainable property pricing and risk selection, and strategies for building portfolio resilience over the long term.