WRMS – A Pioneer in Smart and Sustainable Farming
WRMS is a pioneer in smart and sustainable farming in India that provides integrated risk management and regulatory services that help financial institutions, insurers, and corporates understand, quantify, and manage their risk associated with weather – earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and other weather events – and crop yields. During an interaction with Vidushi, Anuj Kumbhat, Founder & CEO, WRMS discussed how can weather-predictive technology provide a coordinated methodology to tackle the unusual weather events that are hurting Indian agriculture.
What is the inspiration or driving force behind the establishment of WRMS and its mission to revolutionize the agriculture industry in India?
The Genesis of WRMS lies in the first-ever launch of a Weather Index Insurance solution in 2003 by ICICI Lombard. WRMS’s founder Mr. Sonu Agrawal designed that product as the head of the structured product team. He saw value in the concept for the farmers and decided to take the plunge along with Anuj, CEO and co-founder, of WRMS. When the company started its journey in 2004, India had only about 1000 Automatic Weather Stations and a very sparse weather network to offer weather index insurance contracts. WRMS has worked overtime on developing the ecosystem and now has among the largest networks of 15,000 weather stations in India. The company has so far served 10 million beneficiaries, served a portfolio of USD 5 bn, and established over 35 institutional partnerships.
Today WRMS is among India’s most exciting and fast-growing smart farming solutions companies. We are on a mission to innovate the way agriculture is undertaken in India by transforming India’s farms into ‘SecuFarms’ – income-secured smart and sustainable farms. At the heart of it, what propels us is a desire to empower India’s farmers to overcome the most daunting agrarian challenges.
The three main areas of WRMS’s focus are data, technology, and financial innovation which enable farmers to increase production, obtain a stable income, and adopt sustainable farming.
WRMS’s wholly-owned subsidiary Ingen Technologies Private Limited creates smart IoTs with cutting-edge sensor and networking research that allow commercial and social enterprises to realize their full potential. Our technological solutions help government agencies, financial institutions, and private businesses better manage risks associated with dairy and agriculture. The company also offers accurate and real-time weather data services using automated weather stations that help measure parameters like temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, and solar radiation every second. Using electronic traps and image processing methods, remote pest monitoring is carried out. Farmers are also able to arrange smart irrigation using automatic irrigation switches using the WRMS IoT services, saving them time, energy, and water.
WRMS has well-rounded expertise in offering full-stack services in parametric and agriculture insurance. Our holistic service also includes advisory and SAAS platform development, exclusively for parametric and agriculture insurance contracts. WRMS has done Index Insurance product development and hazard assessment studies in India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi. In fact, all insurance companies that offer Weather Index Based Insurance have used WRMS’s services in product design and distribution.
WRMS is positioning itself as a pioneer in smart and sustainable farming. What are some key ways in which WRMS stands out from other Agritech platforms and the impact it has had on farmers’ livelihoods?
Ans – WRMS is the only company that offers farm-level risk management using Risk Pricing Models and provides integrated risk management and regulatory services that help financial institutions, insurers, and corporates understand, quantify, and manage their risk associated with weather – heavy rainfall, hurricanes, floods, and other weather events – and crop yields.
WRMS has engineered a digital-first global parametric insurance marketplace named SecuRisk that supports all stages of Insurance processes, like product design, product validation, digital beneficiary onboarding, product education, policy purchase, claim management & settlement. The platform is backed by a proprietary global data stack and simple product education and capacity-building tools keeping the needs of low-income communities in mind. SecuRisk serves a diverse set of customers such as individuals, aggregators, development institutions, brokers on the demand side, and insurers and reinsurers on the supply side.
WRMS recently introduced the SecuRisk platform. Kindly provide insights into how SecuRisk functions and the specific challenges it aims to address within the agriculture sector?
SecuRisk, developed by WRMS, is a global parametric insurance marketplace that aims to address the gaps and challenges in the emerging economies regarding insurance coverage. The platform provides a wide range of functionalities including product creation, validation, digital beneficiary onboarding, product education, policy buying, claim management, and settlement.
One of the main loopholes that SecuRisk addresses is the limited access to expertise, resources, and data faced by risk carriers and the market in emerging nations. While parametric insurance has gained acceptance in Europe and North America, it has struggled to gain traction in emerging economies due to various factors such as long product rollout times and costs, low-quality accurate data, and a lack of product awareness. These hurdles have prevented rising economies from reaping considerable and long-term benefits from parametric insurance options.
SecuRisk’s proprietary global data stack plays a crucial role in overcoming these challenges. It leverages surface weather, gridded climate data, agricultural yields, and remote sensing data, which are stored and processed in the cloud. This data stack provides a foundation for the platform, offering valuable insights and information to facilitate the creation and implementation of parametric insurance products. With millions of data points uploaded daily, SecuRisk ensures the availability of up-to-date and reliable data for risk assessment and pricing.
The global underinsurance gap is estimated to be $160 billion, and 96% of this gap is in emerging economies. Asia alone accounts for over 85% of this gap. SecuRisk aims to reduce the global underinsurance gap by addressing the loopholes that prevent people from getting insurance. Traditional indemnity-based insurance solutions haven’t been able to fill this gap due to their data quality and resource-intensive nature, high costs, and time-consuming processes, which makes them impractical for covering small ticket risks relevant to these economies. Parametric insurance offers a solution, but its adoption in emerging economies has been limited.
Small and marginal farmers in India face various challenges in the context of climate change and unpredictable weather events. How has WRMS, through the SecuRisk platform, been able to assist these farmers in mitigating these challenges and securing their agricultural livelihoods?
Smallholder farmers in India and in other emerging economies across the globe are crucial to the economy. However, farmers are exposed to risks such as natural disasters, adverse weather conditions, pests and diseases, and fluctuating crop yields. The magnitude and frequency of these events are on the rise, and smallholder farmers in particular are most at risk, as one adverse event is all it takes to be pushed into unviable debt cycles and poverty.
Parametric Insurance is a great fit for smallholder farmers as it is more affordable than traditional insurance and provides timely payout of claims, thereby ensuring adequate cash flow. Parametric insurance has had significant traction in Europe and North America, but the parametric needle hasn’t moved much in India and across emerging economies because risk carriers have limited access to expertise, resources, and data, and distributors have limited access to risk carriers and to tools for effective distribution, education, and operational management of parametric insurance products.
The SecuRisk platform has been designed to address these gaps in the market, with the objective of addressing the $160 billion global underinsurance gap. SecuRisk serves as not only a marketplace connecting risk carriers and customers while equipping both sides with essential tools. It also enables risk carriers to create and issue policies and empowers customers to distribute and onboard easily.The platform supports secure and rapid underwriting and claims management and has simple product education and capacity-building tools that keep the needs of low-income communities in mind. SecuRisk is a very simple, transparent & easy to navigate solution to serve emerging economies & low-literacy communities. The platform has an interface for insurers and reinsurers to evaluate and underwrite parametric policies. It also allows them to manage their portfolio risk and claims through the system. The customer-facing front-end also has a mobile application that enables end-to-end parametric insurance policy lifecycle management for customers through a simplified interface.
With SecuRisk, we provide farmers with relevant, simple, affordable, and readily accessible parametric insurance products when and where they need them. Farmers are able to select the relevant products, specify when, where, and for what risks they would like to be protected against, pay the premium, get regular weather and other advisory and alerts, and be notified of payouts all in one application – SecuRisk.
Looking ahead, what are the strategic plans and goals for WRMS, especially in the next 12 to 15 months, with a specific focus on the development and expansion of the SecuRisk platform?
Currently, at WRMS, the exciting development is the unveiling of SecuRisk, a digital-first global parametric insurance marketplace. The platform aims to address the $160 billion global protection gap by providing a solution for emerging economies. SecuRisk supports product design, validation, beneficiary onboarding, education, policy purchase, claim management, and settlement. It is backed by WRMS’s global data stack, including weather, climate, agriculture, and remote sensing data. The platform targets a wide range of customers, including individuals, aggregators, development institutions, brokers, and re/insurers.
Kindly share any success stories or case studies that illustrate the positive impact WRMS and the SecuRisk platform have had on farmers and stakeholders in the agriculture and dairy risk management sector.
SecuRisk caters to a wide range of different clients, such as individuals, aggregators, development institutions, brokers on the demand side, and insurers and global reinsurers on the supply side.
We have recently implemented the Pacific region’s first innovative index-based micro insurance product covering Cyclonic storm and High wind speed risk in Fiji. The partners involved are three local insurers, SCOR as the global reinsurer, 10+ local aggregators managing the distribution, and supported by UNCDF. There was a payout earlier this year which was identified and calculated on SecuRisk, and paid directly to the beneficiaries’ mobile wallets. The parametric products are based on a novel index that monitors both cyclone intensity and distance from the eye of the storm. Indemnities are calculated using the cyclonic tracks published in real time by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This reduces dependence on satellite-based weather data – which comes with a time lag – and makes the indemnity payout very quick, thereby reducing farmers’ immediate dependence on the government for post-disaster relief. Additional protection against torrential rainfall enhances cover for the community.
