SAR imagery of Alaska captured by Iceye. Photo: Iceye

Commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provider Iceye has entered into a partnership for a joint offering with Swiss Re, one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance and insurance. The partnership will combine Iceye’s flood monitoring with Swiss Re’s risk knowledge to provide tailored solutions for reinsurance and insurance clients.

The strategic partnership will initially focus on floods and it is intended to expand to other natural disasters, such as wildfires, wind and earthquake damages. Swiss Re will gain access to Iceye’s SAR data collected from space, high accuracy observation-based flood maps, and other flood monitoring tools. Swiss Re will make footprint assessments of the events available on CatNet Premium – its proprietary geo risk platform. The companies say this partnership will provide clients faster loss assessment and payouts.

Pranav Pasricha, Swiss Re’s global head of P&C Solutions said this partnership could help clients manage natural disaster scenarios more efficiently and serve their customers better. 

“By combining Swiss Re’s risk knowledge with Iceye’s data, we will be able to further expand our capabilities in geo and remote sensing. The partnership will enable us to develop solutions, advance our services to the benefit of our clients and enable faster claims payouts. We see this as an important commitment for a serious natural catastrophe threat,” Pasricha commented. 

In late February, Iceye published its first set of images from the three satellites launched at the end on the SpaceX Transporter-1 mission. All three spacecraft have completed initial operations and are now progressing through the calibration process, the company reported.