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The Irish company Skytek wins Lloyds award for marine insurance technology

The Irish space company, Skytek, has won the European award from Lloyds for its ground breaking technology for the marine insurance industry.

Lloyds List Awards. Image credits: Lloyds Marine.Earlier this year, Skytek formed a strategic parnership with AON, the leading global insurance broker and professional services company.  Together, they provide real-time software tools for insurers’ to monitor their global marine risk.  Central is the provision of a sanction tool to monitor breaches by their shipping clients.

Both the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and the US Government have recognised the important role that re/insurers have when monitoring potential policy breaches in the marine sector by their insured hull and cargo owners. Such breaches might include illegal ship to ship transfers of oil by a sanctioned entity and turning off collision avoidance (AIS) trackers in sanction zones.

In response, Aon and Skytek launched a suite of War Aggregate Tools using satellite and space technologies to help re/insurers visualise the precise location of their insured risks and how they aggregate across their entire portfolio of vessels in real-time. Customisable alerts and reporting can be configured to show live vessel activity in any zone of interest, be it a restricted area or suspicious activity.

The tools also leverage historical voyage information for up to three years to learn the most commonly-used routes for navigation and identify potential deviations towards sanctioned areas.  Plus, advanced AIS 'spoofing' identification technology is used to determine when a vessel is transmitting incorrect location details by identifying messages without GPS coordinates through to checking reported position against signal validation.

Representatives from AON and the Lloyds list group. Image credits: Lloyds Marine
Christian Silies, Head of Marine & Energy at Aon’s Reinsurance Solutions business, commented: “As part of Aon’s commitment to helping clients make more informed decisions, our collaboration uses innovative technologies to boost knowledge of insurers’ marine risk and enhance risk management practices. The technology enables re/insurers to respond to regulatory pressures while obtaining insights into vessel behaviour and paving the way for data-driven decision making with more efficient risk transfer.”

Dr Sarah Bourke, CEO at Skytek, added: “The ability to take vast amounts of satellite, earth observation and space based data to create tailored insurance products has changed the landscape in the monitoring of insured moving assets.  Creating an environment where re/insurance companies can more effectively monitor and control portfolio risks”.

Dr. Rita Rinaldo, Head of the Institutional Projects Section of European Space Agency (ESA) Business Applications and Space Solutions commented:"  I am pleased to see that ESA’s support has helped Skytek to achieve such a great result. The award and their success showed how the co-investment made by ESA and Skytek in the project gave a high return in terms of socio-economic impact, allowing Skytek to succeed in commercialising the service proving the value of space technologies such as SAT-AIS in a sector such as the re/insurance sector ".

Piera Di Vito, the project’s Technical Officer at the ESA, commented: “Following ESA’s support, it is rewarding to see a practical application of science to the insurance industry – and in turn supporting re/insurers globally to have confidence in the protection of their assets.”

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The Irish space company, Skytek, has won the European award from Lloyds for its ground breaking technology for the marine insurance industry.

Matchmaking meets sustainability at Slush 2019

“Just a little gathering of 25,000 changemakers, including 4,000 startups and 2,000 investors on November 21–22, 2019,” is how Slush summed up the event where ESA BIC Finland put in a stand that gathered the Nordic partners from across the ESA Business Application and Space Solutions (BASS) network together with the ESA BASS team and ESA Earth Observation Programme (EOP). 

The leading event for start-ups, SLUSH 2019 was a futuristic fest of sustainability, deeptech, investment opportunities and matchmaking. (Image credit: Pasi Salminen/Slush Media)

 

Slush 2019 with its whopping 25 000 attendees was possibly the biggest start-up event (ever) and one where sustainability, deep tech and investment were the themes ‘du jour’.

Slush according to Slush 

Slush has grown from a 300-person assembly to a community of true global magnitude. Slush began as a student-driven, not-for-profit movement created to support the next generation of ground-breaking entrepreneurs. Stellar success and global interest has turned the two-day event in Helsinki into a weeklong affair with multiple side events focused on start-ups, scale ups, investors and founders.

ESA BIC Finland organised the ESA stand in collaboration with ESA BASS, ESA EOP and the Nordic ESA BICs. The state-of-the-art über-interactive stand included AR/VR demos, one from EOP Phi Lab showcasing the capabilities of EO and its relevance to start-ups. 

Matthias Maurer and the Ntention glove

The stand also benefitted from Astronaut in training Matthias Maurer who provided the buzz and drew in crowds with demos of some of the innovation technologies (Matthias was so taken with the Ntention glove that he couldn’t resist a quick tweet.) 

The ESA BICs in residence also brought along their stellar incubates, including:  Awake.AI, Aurora Propulsion Technologies, Arctic Astronautics, Arctic Space Technologies AB, Centropy AB, Mooringo AB and Eningo AB Gilytics, ClearSpace, ANYbotics, Golbriak Space OÜ.

The ESA BASS team also attended one of the side events organised by an ESA BIC Finland’s alumni Collective Crunch. The workshop introduced the topic of Digital Forestry. Participants could meet ‘cool, calm and hassle-free’ Linda, their AI platform and witness Collective Crunch’s trajectory from the ESA BIC to BA seeing first-hand the ‘Slush effect’ as well as the entire supply chain in the forestry sector. Themes of Carbon Capture and Storage were palpable in the workshop as emerging new trends. 

Slush as a large-scale event offered a multitude of matchmaking and networking opportunities as well as flagging up hot topics such as ocean tech and everyday environmentalism. 

Sustainability was also the start and end note for the event. Slush was founded with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals as their foundation, so they make sure this is reflected at all levels of their operations – meticulously analysing the impact of their global events. (Slush Helsinki is an EkoKompassi/ EcoCompass certified event, using only biodegradable disposables, partnering with environmentally–friendly suppliers, serving only tap water, and using recycled or reused materials.)  

So what was the ESA BASS takeaway message? 

Space technology is the future for business formation whether start-up or scale-up in a sustainable – in all its forms (business and environment-wide) – way.  

See you in Helsinki on the 19-20 November for Slush 2020 …

 

Read more about the Sustainable Development Goals in Space as a Superpower

 

 

 

 

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“Just a little gathering of 25,000 changemakers, including 4,000 startups and 2,000 investors on November 21–22, 2019,” is how Slush summed up the event where ESA BIC Finland put in a stand that gathered the Nordic partners from across the ESA Business Application and Space Solutions (BASS) network together with the ESA BASS team and ESA Earth Observation Programme (EOP).

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