By Henry Gale

April 3 - (The Insurer) - Blue Marble announced a goal of doubling its impact by 2027 at this year's World Economic Forum meeting. CEO Jaime de Piniés provided more detail on how it might achieve this in an interview with The Insurer TV.

Blue Marble currently reaches 500,000 people across Asia, Africa and Latin America through its parametric climate insurance policies.

At this year's WEF meeting in Davos, Blue Marble announced the goal to double its impact by 2027.

"We want to reach 1 million individuals," de Piniés said, "and also double the capacity we're enabling so that we can actually provide more risk capital out there in emerging markets."

He stressed that the company plans to achieve this ambition in a commercially sustainable way, with high renewal rates and a well-performing portfolio, to achieve a lasting impact. To date, de Piniés said, renewal rates on its climate risk insurance policies have been close to 100%.

"And on the supply side, what we're seeing is a book that is performing well, combined ratios that are attractive, that reinsurers can provide risk capital and that we can scale," he added.

First launched at the 2015 WEF meeting by a consortium of insurance companies, Blue Marble is owned by Zurich, Marsh McLennan, TransRe, Aspen and Assa.

To help it reach its growth goal, Blue Marble has launched a new reinsurance facility fronted by Zurich and backed by global reinsurers. "The reason we are doing this is because we found, in many of the countries where we're operating, that this is a real pain point in the market," de Piniés said.

Citing the company's work in Kyrgyzstan as an example, he explained: "Providing access to international risk capacity to these markets is fundamental, because otherwise it's very difficult to jump-start this programme, and then, once it's jump-started, to take it to scale."

To be eligible for the facility, risks need to be parametric, climate-related and target communities that lack adequate protection.

De Piniés highlighted three distribution models the company has found to be commercially viable. The first is working with corporations to build resilience in their supply chain by insuring producers. For example, Blue Marble is now working with Nestlé's suppliers across eight countries, after starting with a small-scale pilot in Colombia in 2018, de Piniés said.

"The second business model is working with financial institutions: banks and microfinance institutions," he continued. "What we've been working on is how can we embed insurance in their workflows, in their processes, such that they can actually transfer the risk so they can start lending to SMEs, to the agriculture sector."

The third model involves working with governments and international organisations. Blue Marble is involved in a project recently announced by the InsuResilience Solutions Fund to embed parametric climate insurance into the Dominican Republic's social security programme.