Guy Carpenter

Their core work

Guy Carpenter is a global reinsurance brokerage and catastrophe risk advisory firm headquartered in London, part of the Marsh McLennan group. Their core business is helping insurers and reinsurers model, price, and transfer natural catastrophe risk — including flood, storm, and climate-driven extremes. In H2020, they participated as an industrial third party in MSCA training networks, hosting PhD researchers and contributing real-world risk analytics context from the reinsurance industry's perspective. Their involvement in both flood risk assessment and sub-seasonal climate forecasting research reflects a direct business interest in improving the probabilistic models that underpin reinsurance pricing and catastrophe bond structuring.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their first H2020 project (2016–2019), Guy Carpenter's engagement was grounded in physical flood systems — inundation dynamics, catchment behaviour, flood defence failure, and hazard–vulnerability frameworks typical of engineering-side catastrophe modelling. By their second project (2019–2023), the focus had shifted toward the atmosphere: sub-seasonal predictability, extreme weather statistics, and coherent atmospheric structures that precede high-impact events. This trajectory mirrors the broader reinsurance industry shift from static exposure mapping toward dynamic, probabilistic climate risk — driven by the growing influence of climate change on loss exceedance curves and the need for actionable forecasts weeks ahead of extreme events.

Guy Carpenter is moving from reactive flood risk cataloguing toward forward-looking probabilistic climate forecasting, suggesting interest in collaborations that improve lead time and confidence in extreme weather predictions at timescales relevant to reinsurance portfolio management.

How they like to work

Guy Carpenter has participated exclusively as a third party in MSCA Innovative Training Networks — meaning they have not led projects or taken formal partner positions, but have hosted and co-supervised early-stage researchers as an industry training host. This is a deliberate, low-commitment engagement model that lets a large corporate extract research value and shape PhD training without assuming full project management responsibility. With 36 consortium partners across two projects they have broad exposure to academic networks, but their non-coordinator track record means they are best approached as an industry co-supervisor or advisory stakeholder rather than a consortium lead.

Guy Carpenter's two MSCA-ITN participations connected them to 36 unique consortium partners across 8 countries, a wide network for just two projects, reflecting the large academic consortia typical of ITN grants. Their geographic reach spans primarily European research institutions, consistent with their London base and EU regulatory exposure.

What sets them apart

Guy Carpenter is one of very few global reinsurance brokers with documented H2020 research engagement, giving them rare credibility as a bridge between academic catastrophe science and the financial risk transfer market. For researchers working on flood risk, climate extremes, or probabilistic hazard modelling, Guy Carpenter offers something academic partners cannot: direct access to how loss models are actually used in reinsurance pricing, catastrophe bond structuring, and regulatory capital calculation. Consortium builders seeking an industry partner who can translate research outputs into financial product specifications should consider them a high-value third-party host.

Highlights from their portfolio

• SYSTEM-RISK
  A large-scale systems approach to flood risk that spans physical modelling (inundation, catchment dynamics) through to risk management — an unusually integrated scope that suited Guy Carpenter's need to connect engineering models to insurance exposure estimates.
• CAFE
  Addresses sub-seasonal climate forecasting of extremes — a forecasting horizon (2–6 weeks) of direct commercial value to reinsurers managing seasonal portfolio exposure, making this a strategically motivated research engagement rather than a peripheral one.