But I think I'll kick things off while people join. I see some folks starting to join the room. For 10 days, if you wouldn't mind, get to see some player names, I'm Melissa. If you wouldn't mind, feel free to use the chat box, introduce yourself, if you have any burning questions for our esteemed panel here. Feel free to throw them in. I'm not kicking things off now so that we can be efficient and we can not hear me join on but we can talk to the experts here. So my name is Tim Ranham, managing partner at Mercy Corps Ventures. We are a thesis driven investor focused on climate resilience and financial resilience. Super excited to be here today with Anuj, Vessie, and Rose. Each is building the next generation of insurance products. For dining in, want to provide a little bit of context for audience members who maybe have different touch points with the insurance stack. So from the floods in Germany to the dual flood and drought in Nigeria, which I understand is pretty unprecedented. We've seen catastrophic loss of life and destruction of property as a result we've streamed weather this past year. In the reporting of New York Times and the floods in Germany, humanity hadn't seen this in perhaps a thousand years, which should give us a collective pause. So the new evolving calculus for weather risk will to maintain our food systems urban planning and really how many of the world 600 million farmers depend on their livelihoods. So as we look towards some of the research on insurance, Swiss Free Provider of Insurance estimates the global financial losses resulting from these catastrophes will account for about $40 billion a year in damages, of which only 30% is insured. So we see a massive insurance gap, especially in emerging markets across the entire spectrum of risks. And that's what we assembled this panel to discuss. From the Colombian farmer who's looking to ensure their coffee crop from drought to a multinational supply chain in Ghana that's looking for business interruption protection or to secure some of their assets to a government that is looking for insurance products to secure their financial ability to respond to disasters. There's really a gap at all these level. This is from the micro, mezzo and macro levels. And so that's kind of the context for the conversation today. What I think is really interesting about the solutions that Bessie, Rose and Anuj's team are building is that they're kind of attacking more and more of these at the same time. And I think that's quite unique and shows how we need kind of a comprehensive solution and it's a complimentary actions across all these markets. The last thing I'll leave you with is there's been a lot of really interesting research looking at how holistic range of insurance in a market is actually a major determinant of whether an emerging market economy is able to recover quickly and resiliently. I'll put this in the chat box but some really interesting research that basically shows that countries that have this comprehensive stack of insurance are able to bounce back from catastrophes much more faster and inclusively than those that don't. So that's why I think the importance of why we're here talking about it. So I'll hand it over to our panelists. It'd be great if, you know, introduction personally and in your company, if you kind of show where you fit in the insurance stack, the micro, mezzo, or macro level, and then we'll dive into questions. And again, for attendees, feel free to pin your questions in here. Very happy to incorporate those. We can make this as attendee-focused as possible. So maybe Rose, I'll hand it over to you first. I think you're on your way. Yeah, no, I was just going to say, let me make sure I'm not muted. So my name is Rose Goslinga. I'm the co-founder and co-CEO of Pula. We do agriculture insurance. We started, and based out of Nairobi, most of the time, in a budget currently. We started about five, nearly six years ago. Our main objective that we saw is that there were enough insurance companies that could take on risk, but they didn't necessarily understand risk. At the same time, there wasn't a lot of capacity to actually settle and execute insurance products from start and from pricing side all the way to the end on the settlement side. And so we take, we're pretty much a one-stop shop. We price risk for farmers. We price risk for aggregators. We price risk for governments. So your micro, mezzo, I find those terms, they're useful for development agencies, but they're not useful for normal people. It's completely confusing, I find half the time. But anyway, so I would say we take care of the whole chain. We work together with over 40 plus insurance companies. I would say 10 re-insurers at this point. We work at this point across 22 markets and 17 of them in Africa, four of them in Asia, insured 5.1 million smallholder farmers since we started, insured over a billion dollars worth of agriculture investment and over three million hectares worth of agricultural land. That's pretty much us. Great, Anuj. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks, Tim. I'm Anuj. I'm from, I'm co-founder and CEO of WRMS. We are a company in agriculture and climate risk management. Started in 2004 primarily for developing weather index insurance, which was basically the product which was first offered to farmers in India way back in 2003. And that gave us motivation to start a separate company to design, develop and implement index insurance solutions because we found that most of the insurance companies were really not having the expertise. And so that has been our journey. We have worked in almost all kinds of parametric insurance solutions. Again, micro, meso and macro level. Work with governments in India, in Bangladesh, in Cambodia and Fiji, and about 10 other countries. Overall about five million farming and low income households covered. We have helped manage about two and a half billion dollars of risk for farmers largely and chiefly in India, but then also in South Asian countries like Indonesia and Sri Lanka. So that's about us. And we are right now working on secure farm solution. It is basically farm level yield guarantees for smaller farmers because we see that basically in micro insurance, it's very difficult to manage basis risk for the farmer to understand that. And that's how we decided that we'll offer a farm level yield guarantees and we'll talk about it later. Thank you. Thank you. And finally, Vessi. Thanks, Tim. And it's great to be here on this panel. I've been really looking forward to this conversation with everybody and awesome to be here with these two other really cool organizations. In many years, Cloud Street comes at this from a different angle. Cloud Street is a really does focus more on the, whether macro or whatever you wanna call kind of the larger level of insurance work. Primarily at the government or the large corporate level. We're also primarily a technology platform first and work through partners. So I probably should have said I'm the co-founder and CEO of Cloud Street. But more specifically, what we do is track floods globally in near real time and analyze flood risk as it changes through a system that we build without using ground equipment. We specifically have been working originally with Google and now with a variety of different partners in order to fuse 15 different satellites, radar, optical, microwave, down to 30 centimeter resolution using AI and then community intelligence to our partners on the ground. For folks who may or may not know in the audience here, this technology, which I think many of the other folks who are using it, are used here is really critical for parametric flood insurance or index insurance. And very quickly for folks who may not know that essentially uses a proxy data trigger to provide the payout rather than a person or field appraiser on the ground. What Cloud Street really focuses on is doing the opposite of traditional flood mapping and the opposite of traditional flood insurance by doing everything from the sky. We started working on this, as I mentioned with Google about eight years ago and really proud to say that our science was on the cover of nature about two months ago. We released that paper alongside the largest database of flood maps in the world all for free. The data set itself revealed 86 million people who are at risk who had not been identified before by more traditional flood models. We've primarily used the platform to provide critical information to governments at the national level in 18 countries around the world, primarily in developing and emerging markets. Those governments today are using the system to monitor 300 million people, distribute aid and emergency services like search and rescue to hundreds of thousands of people in any given rainy season, relocate vulnerable people and things like that. But really over the years, as we were working with governments, the primary thing we kept hearing from them is fantastic. Now that we have all this information to understand when a community needs search and rescue or that we should be providing flood protection over here, with what additional money do you expect me to go take those actions? Now that data is no longer a problem. And at the same time, we were having global, some of the largest global insurers, reinsurers and brokers come to us to say, we've never had the data in these locations to underwrite effectively for the types of risk that we're interested in. As Tim mentioned, there's a massive protection gap in emerging markets. So about a year and a half ago, we began working with two key insurance partners to design a parametric technology on top of our existing flood information systems. And we're now using that at the sovereign level, meaning the sort of national government level, in order to offer insurance to about 60 million or to cover 60 million people through the national government. And happy to get more in depth about what that is versus kind of other components of ensuring the economy. But as Tim mentioned, this is an essential part, I think, of how we're gonna build risk transfer, particularly in the developer world. Great, thanks everybody. Best you can touch on something on the technology side that's enabled some of the work you've been able to do and then products you're creating and the analytics. But yeah, Rose, I'd love to hear a little bit more about, because Pula and then your previous work in the insurance space, I mean, certainly developed new advances in technology that have allowed you to do what you do. I'd be curious, A, what have been kind of those tailwinds that you've ridden advances in remote sensing, GIS, whatever it is. And then, not necessarily conversely, but where does that kind of opportunity end? Like, where's that kind of tech and touch nexus for the work you're able to do? Let's say the biggest technology, or the biggest technology tailwind is the smartphone. Like, I think, you know, like our, like, I think still, like, and this is, usually it doesn't make me very popular when I say this.  So people are buying your product and people here are meeting like smaller farmers or government officials. And I see this and like at both levels, you'll see a government official who's extremely well educated, has been to the same university as I have been.  So it's not exactly what they're looking for, but that you're measuring it through something else. And they're kind of looking at you and the more technology there is in there, you know, like the, often like the more questioning their face becomes in the beginning. So they really, like we, we found that like, you know, adding a level of like few people on the ground equipped with smartphones helps us. Like I like what Bessie was saying in terms of like, it's you want to combine what comes on the ground and you want, and with what comes from the sky. Like we have, we have a product where we use, we call it field sense and we have another product that like is aptly called Skyfall. And one of my Nigerian clients said, hey, so we start, we get, we sense what is going on in the field and then we wait to see what the sky will fall from, what will fall from the sky. And I think that's really like where you want to be at the moment, like and how you want to approach things. So you want to build like insurance, if you're selling insurance to whoever it is, you want to build trust through a level of things that they can see and touch. And having like field observations, I think is really key and critical to growth. I remember coming like what, like we don't do anything in India, but I remember started like having a conversation with people in the Indian insurance market and we were like, well, what about using satellite? And they were like, there's no way we're going to get farmers to buy into that. It's purely that. And so you have to look at a combination of factors. And as you, if you want to reach scale, you have to get buy in from your customer. Like I think we look at these products from a perspective like, hey, you know, this is a really good thing for you to buy, but we don't often think about how the buying journey is. What does the customer, like how does the customer experience this product? If the customer has zero interaction with you and with the end of the season, at the cropping season, you come to them and say, there is a payout.  And if it's not, if it's not big enough, they'll be like, well, go home and redo your calculation.  We've had really good renewal rates, like 85% for the last five, six years that we've been there. And like the key to that is like having that interaction. And understanding that what your client wants has a certain level of low tech as well as sort of level of high tech. Thanks for that. Anusha, I'd be curious to hear how you respond to that. I know in our conversation, a few weeks back, we talked about the importance of wrap around services besides just your core insurance product. Yeah, so while I agree to Rose that, yes, smartphone is probably the technology which farmers understand and look up to. So what we have actually started doing is during the course of our work with the farmers, we realized that a lot of these solutions are not getting implemented because high basis risk. In fact, a lot of farmers are losing more often than they should. And that's when we realized that this is very important to fuse tech technology and tell farmer what has to be done. So a lot of risk which are idiosyncratic in nature can be managed by technology and telling farmer from time to time. Fortunately for us in India, actually the smartphone revolution, the big data, cloud and remote sensing changes have all happened at the same time. And India has a very, very high penetration of smartphones, even in rural areas, compared to a lot of other smaller countries. So what we started doing is that we started offering farmers a package of advisory services. And if they were following those advisories, most of these were monitored digitally using, again, technology like remote sensing, IoTs and mobile phones. And we have feet on the street, basically on ground in the farm. So we visit farmer, we advise, there is a lot of more interaction which happens. And during the course of this interaction, we've also realized that it's much easier to sell inputs to the farmer. So that adds the whole value to the farmer. He gets the, he or she gets the right kind of inputs and they apply those inputs and minimize the risk. And when the input application both in terms of irrigation, pest and disease were all linked to ECTEC. So basically we were telling the soil moisture is low, you should do the irrigation. And we have worked with lots of companies in India, including Papsico, Bayard, and we have been able to prove that a farmer was able to save one irrigation or he was able to optimize, or she was able to optimize the pest and disease spray. And that saved, I mean, there was a direct linkages to the risk management and ECTEC. And in that sense, even after doing that, if the farmer is losing the crop, they are getting paid for it. And a very good validation of this just happened when there was a flood. Farmer was actually looking forward to get a yield which was about 20% higher because of the solutions which were offered to the farmer. And there was a sudden flood. And the farmer told us that, okay, I was checking your application every day and doing whatever you were suggesting. And I was looking forward to a very good yield this season because of whatever amends I could make in the crop based on your suggestion. But unfortunately, this flood has happened. So when the farmer got the payout on account of that, that even he or she realized that, okay, this is helping them out. And that was basically a validation of how the convergence of risk management with ECTEC can help farmer one, primarily to reduce the risk. And in case it cannot be reduced in this case, which was a one in 20 year flood, which has happened to get paid for it. So I think for us, the technology has been both used in terms of advising farmer and what and how to do it. And also to settle the farmer quickly in case there is a loss. So we monitor farms very regularly on a daily basis. And there are algorithm based triggers which allow us to go on the field in case we see that there is a deviation from what the crop growth should be, then what it actually is. And that helps us in selectively monitoring farms wherever we see that there is a possible loss. And advising farmer first to mitigate and manage the loss. And in case that doesn't happen, we pay. At the back of it, we call ourselves for all homogenous risk, we basically bundle them in form of index insurance solution. So for us, farmer doesn't understand index insurance or proxy insurance so easily. So for the farmer, the solution is quite simple. You lose your yield, you do the things, you have done the right thing, you still lost the yield, you're getting paid for it. But for us, all homogenous risk gets transferred to insurance market and we buy basically an index insurance solutions to cover. So for us, it's basically fusing the technology and the risk management together and offering it to the farmer along with the inputs and marketing with this. Great, thanks. Bestie, I'd love if you could speak to this from the types of policies you guys are helping construct and then maybe a little bit background on kind of the end points you've actually addressed in designing those, projects are helping insurers in design those products. Ah, definitely. So, I mean, Cloud to Street sits in I think a pretty different place in the value chain than the other folks here. We also are fairly narrow in it in that we provide the analytics band directly to insurers, reinsurers and brokers. We are not the distribution, we are not, we don't do very much actuarial work. We really are what's called an MCD calculation agent and the analytics or the hazard model that the insurers then build their structuring on top of. It's supposed to be clear about kind of where we sit but I really wanted to very much agree with the underlying points about trust being probably the most essential thing here, especially as we're building more robust insurance markets and different types of risk transfer really broadening out our conception of what insurance actually means in very new places. Trust is really essential here and we see that in a very different type of context I think than we've been talking about within the insurance industry itself. And with that, it's really much more driven by status quo but I mean, I would say at this point in our relationship with insurers, actual trust and really reputational cover for using a different type of data and offering a different type of insurance product. The parametric is a very, very, very small part of how the overall insurance market is actually conducted. For them to take both of those leaps to do those two types of innovation, the trust and the reputational cover is just as essential as the accuracy of our models right now. They care just as much that what we've done is validated. There's other folks who can say this is legitimate that they have a little bit of cover as the accuracy of what we're providing them overall. I do think that will start shifting a bit but that's always really important because insurance is essentially just a gamble. It's just replacing that on whatever the best available information is. And insurers are talking about does that part of the value change here?  Like insurers today, we also work quite a bit in the American market here where there is a really robust insurance industry that is completely public, fully backed by the American government 90% or more of it. And it's largely based on flood maps that pretty much everyone acknowledges from the government to the insurance industry to I think at this point, largely the vast majority of the American public realizes is inaccurate and in many cases missing, particularly missing for the most vulnerable communities in the US. And yet it is still hard to make a change from that status quo to something that we all know is more accurate. And so I think building up trust within the insurance industry to really try new things, to get into new markets, to use different types of technologies to use better data, even if they have already acknowledged that it is better data, but the first year that you use it takes some real cover. I think that's really essential as we talk about building different types of markets in different types of places and really bringing in the kind of capital that we're just, we know we're gonna need from these larger players into these markets. So that said, the other thing I just wanna touch on as well from a scientific perspective is we always say that we would trust the person with standing in six inches of water at their feet, more than the box flying over their heads saying whether or not it's flooded, there are not. I think the difficulty is a lot of what I think Rose and Anusha are working on, which is actually getting that information embedded into the underlying models that we're using as well. And the way that we use community intelligence to our partners, which is primarily the government and the first responders who they have, we use that as training data and ground truth data in the work that we do so that any detection in where we're working in Ghana also improves the algorithm in California. And I think that just is an interesting, in many ways, algorithmic to the way that risk and our kind of future solutions to climate risk are really dependent on everything. We all depend on each other in order to create them. Great, thanks. Rose and Anusha, either one of you can go first. I'd be curious to hear about how you've kind of managed the economics of your distribution channels given that, yeah, FaceTime with farmers is critical. You're undoubtedly using smartphones and other technology to increase that cost. But how have you approached making this economically viable at scale, given that you guys are reaching millions and millions of farmers at the moment with different policies? I don't know, Rose, are either one field to pick the first? I can start off. I think for us the scale, we realize one thing that to scale it quickly and at the size which we wish to achieve and I'm talking more from the perspective of the integrated solutions which we are offering at a micro level, not the MISA and macro insurance which obviously is done through V2B channels, but the solution of SecuFarm wherein we are integrating ECTEC with risk management and also primary driver is to scale it up and to actually offer the solution, I would say profitably is to integrate inputs which is what we are doing in the markets in India where we are offering inputs along with advisory and more optimized input offtake which is happening and also making market linkages. So for us, how we are able to plan to scale it up is basically connect all these dots together and put feet on the ground to actually provide the solution. So obviously this requires capital but it basically is whatever is happening in India, there is a lot of technology based input sale which is happening through mobile applications and through advisories. We are just adding one more layer to it and offering the risk management support and making it much more believable for a farmer to really subscribe to what we are offering and that has held up in terms of scale when we work in a village, if we start with X number of farmer, every season it's actually getting double and primarily it also increases the offtake of inputs that helps us in expanding faster and this has also helped us in tying up with critical pieces which is input companies and output organizations and they in turn are actually helping us making this model more B2B2C. So it's helping us in scaling by connecting to these organizations and reaching out to the farmers who are already working with them. So that helps us in basically scaling up by using agri-value chain players and also the farmer groups and the credit institution. So we are working with a lot of credit institutions in India who are actually providing the farm credit or farm group credit which is what we call as farmer producer groups in India and there are lots of them. About three and a half million farmers in India are connected to some producer groups. So these are the groups which we are targeting to reach out to the farmers. So that's how the scale is coming. But many initial stage in this year we are probably going to offer this kind of solution at a micro level to about 50,000 farmers along with input along with micro linkages but I think there is absolutely 4X growth which we are predicting for next year with whatever business plan we have. What are the sounds like compared to how you see it? I would say like our focus is we've kind of oscillated. We've gone to like we did quite a bit of B2B2C for a while and then found it really difficult to make those margins work. And I think we're at the moment we're pretty hard on just B2B, B2G. We do a slight bit of kind of more B2B2C at the moment but we're careful because the margins are very difficult to make them really kind of work at scale. And I think if you're running an enterprise and you find something where the margins are decent like I've actually like the market for that I used to think that the market for that was much smaller it is quite large actually. It's a significant opportunity. And so that then it's I think B2B is sometimes a bit hard because the closing cycle is very long. Like your cycle that you close I think we did with some mats on the third day and like our commercial managers like bulked at this but I think our closing cycle takes about eight and a half months to close a deal. And just the reality man. Whereas of course if you're doing micro then the reality is like you could close a deal on a day by day basis that has a lot of gratification in there. But I think if you're running a sustainable enterprise I think the key thing is to understand that margins matter. Like I am all about like the storytelling and the part of that and the picture of somebody who just had insurance but in the end we're trying to all of us here are trying to run businesses and we're trying to make sure that they scale and grow. And if you have a negative margin business you can't scale, you can't grow. So from our perspective it's like we really are pretty focused on having like B2B and B2G opportunities that we pursue at whether we execute them on a micro, mes or a macro level that's really up to the client to decide. It's just I think insurance then the way that it's structured and set up is very you really have to understand psychology of insurance. Like I've been selling insurance for the last 10 plus years and I myself do not like buying insurance. I still consider it as a cost. I'd rather not have it. So if that's coming from like who's arguably one of the strongest advocates for insurance if that's my personal perspective then we have to be honest ourselves like when you talk to your clients that that's also gonna be the case. I love what Bessie was saying around hey everybody knows that this is a really old flood map but it's really difficult for them to change to the new flood map. And because change requires people taking risk and when risk you basically put your ass on the line so and that's and you are the hydrologist in the whether you're the hydrologist in the ministry of agriculture in the US or the hydrologist in the ministry of agriculture in Nigeria, those risk profiles are fairly similar and people are very unlikely to make those changes. So I would say for like in a distribution structure it can be very tempting to kind of go to a BTC model but I think in insurance we have to be very cognizant in all of these developing markets where we say the protection gap is huge like in the developed markets the way that this market has grown is through a B2G and a B2B model. And so it will be like there's some there's some really interesting stats like if you take the current like for agriculture insurance the current overall penetration if I'm not mistaken is if you remove like I think is like in Asia is around the 20 like just I think it's around it's somewhere between 15 and 20% and if you remove the Indian market which is largely like a compulsory product like I don't know maybe you maybe you argue with that but from my perspective it's basically a low knee product like if the farmers don't take a loan then they don't get insurance and the percentage of farmers that buy voluntarily is very low. Now if you take away if you take away the percentage in Asian market penetration if you take away the Indian market and that particular scheme you go from 15 to 3% insurance penetration which is very similar to what we have in Africa. So it's like or it's an even similar and if you look in Latin America if you take out the Mexican scheme out of the Latin American scheme you get to a very similar kind of low penetration rates. So if that is a worldwide effectively phenomenon then you have to kind of think then it's not about what Rose or Anouge is doing right. So this is how people's psychology towards insurance works. And I'm like yeah I just I've learned that I have to listen to those kind of macro numbers. Yeah I appreciate that. Basically I looked at here I mean definitely on this you guys have the disaster analytics suite which for years it was kind of or the first few years it was applied to product and specifically sold to governments and now like kind of indicated in the opening segue into sovereign risk insurance. We'd love to hear kind of yeah your reactions to that sales cycle building trust and then yeah looking at kind of the sovereign risk macro level insurance. How are you how do you see making that sustainable? Like how is that actually financed? How is it structured? We'd love to hear your perspective on that market. Yeah well there's so many threads to pick up on here. I'll try to answer your question directly and maybe even answer the question that I didn't fully answer last time but yeah I really respect what Anouge and Rose do since I mean cloud industry is again very narrow in the value chain and really a data analytics provider and so that's imparted in an effort to ensure that we can we have margins and a sustainable business in what we do but we're very cognizant of what part of the market and part of our theory of change that we're not able to touch because we get so narrow and try to work with partners on the ground and then also I'd say the biggest costing for us is a lot of the customer support that we provide first with our existing product directly to the governments to enable to do trainings and to enable them to understand use the data that we have and then help adjust their standard operating procedures when it comes to emergency response or when it comes to thinking through different planning decisions around infrastructure rezoning or things like that and to put some real effort into that work. I, the entryway into insurance for us really does come from this larger scale top down perspective and as Tim has been talking about we really started by leveraging the trust that we had with the existing governments that we were working with and they're I think real need and very obvious clear need for capital to take the kinds of actions that we were doing and even just to pay for the subscription for our service that they often needed support financing in. The almost every government that we work with has talked about a real interest in transferring risk and getting some kind of insurance for themselves as the sovereign to pay for large disasters or pay for preparation work that they wanted to do ahead of time which more and more the interest we work with are interested in supporting and helping to invest in. So I think that's really exciting move for the first entryway where we're going again this can mostly at the national level work and primarily in Africa. As we expand into other business lines all through our insurance partner so we're not an insurance brand at least at this point. We are really working with whatever the kinds of business lines that they are interested in bringing us and underwriting via the data set and the technology that we have. For I think these other business lines building trust we're gonna get is will be more difficult with their direct. So the other things that we're is currently being structured on our technology is supplemental homeowners insurance and business interruption or supply chain insurance. And I just wanna spend a moment to talk about this last one. I think that there is an increasing understanding of what risk could be. So to Rose's point, I completely agree that even the brokers who we work with are like, oh yeah, I don't have flood insurance on my home because that would be a pain in the butt to pay for. And I do think that at least at the corporate and government levels less of the individual purchaser I do think a sense of risk is changing for and I think two big factors driving that are one, these larger events happening around the world and we particularly look at flooding but if you just take the disasters in China the disasters in Germany, the disasters where I'm from in the mid-Atlantic in the US that got a ton of press coverage is really I think changing folks understanding of kind of the unpredictable. And I just wanna say that is not to mention the massive floods that we were responding to in the Ring Hinga refugee camps in Nigeria and in Ghana that were equally devastated and just don't get the same level of coverage. The second thing is just the pandemic which I think is just an obvious shift in people's sense of risk and interest in preparing ahead of time whether it's through actual action or for coming up with the financing scheme. The pandemics disrupted something like and cost something like $4 trillion in GDP loss. Like these numbers are a little bit squishy and I think it actually could be higher than that. And the amount of supply chain risk that is currently still affected by what's happening now I think is a pretty big shockwaves through the corporate world at least from the folks that we talk to. And we've seen risk managers and TFOs who are much more eager to look at more types of risk transfer in various places and take that portfolio more seriously and invest in it in a more serious way and getting more mandates from their board and their bosses. So again, I'm talking at kind of a higher level not the kind of individuals risk profile but I think at these larger kind of movers of the economy being like national governments and large corporates we are seeing a shift in interest to invest in insurance more broadly because of a real sense of changing risk. And we are just wrapping up here but I guess when we do one last quick round hopefully ending on a positive note I'd love to hear what each of you is particularly excited about whether within your own company or does generally kind of the insure tech sector like what makes you optimistic about the future? Where do you see things headed that make you quite excited? Maybe an unusual start with you and then Rose and then closing out with Betsy. Yeah, thanks, time. I think primarily if you have seen that 2021 and 2020 the risk evens have increased and I see that a lot of pandemic as Betsy has said that has made people aware about what are the risks which they need to cover and what they need to look for. Plus more important thing is and we are very gung-ho about that from the small older perspective and Indian context or South Asia context is that we have started working with farmers to give what a lot of positive connotations to full risk management by talking about risk reduction and yield improvements before we talk about covering the risk or risk management part of it. So as Rose was mentioning that a lot of what renewables are associated with last season's claim. So even in Indian proportions market if there is a good claim last year you would find that voluntary uptake is huge. Example is Maharashtra and a lot of other Indian states where the voluntary uptake is huge because there was a last season claim. So rather than associating risk management with a lot of loss and compensation I think we are not talking more about the minimizing, mitigating the risk and improving the yields of the farmers and for us that's something which is actually getting a lot of traction and I see that this opportunity is completely associated with changing the way the agriculture is done in a lot of smaller markets and that's how what makes us gamble because you will have to start producing more from the same piece of land and probably that's a opportunity which can be harnessed and risk management can be linked to that opportunity and that's what we are trying to do that a lot of positive connotations in terms of helping farmer grow more or grow better from the same piece of land and at the same time helping farmer to invest more in technology and without worrying about losing the crop on account of adverse events and that's where I see that there's a large opportunity and almost all the farmers we speak to are extremely interested in such kind of solutions which are helping them earn more while ensuring that the risk is getting managed so that's about it for us. Thanks a lot. Rosa, if you're free to jump in, what's the set? Sorry, I would say then overall development in the sector I think there's an increasing amount of investment and interest in it. I think what people are still figuring out is as you asked a couple of times is distribution model and whoever cracks the distribution model with a decent little bit of economics behind it will make it work, I don't have any doubt. I think product-wise I think there's a number of really good products in the market I think distribution-wise we're still not in the area I think that's the biggest challenge for the sector. Bessie, over to you. I guess I see one thing that I'm excited about hard to pin down the most but is the amount of true investment like capital overall broadly conceived that's really coming into this it is also something that scares me quite a bit. Like I think both the amount of, I'll just stick with I think what probably many folks here so cap think about but the amount of billion dollar close to billion dollars climate tech funds that are popping up right now and the amount of then talent that's being reallocated in many ways from more extractive or industries into climate tech I think is really encouraging and I think is just flat out necessary. Like we need that capital, we need that effort in order to create the kinds of solutions not just for adaptation and risk transfer like what we're talking about here but for changing the broader economy overall. It also I think is a scary to me in the sense that anytime you kind of pour money into something and then you try to make, as we were talking about you have to make margins on it if there's going to be a scalable business opportunity in it, it scares me in the sense that we won't have the new systems oriented towards the most vulnerable people. And I say this as someone who really as I've been emphasizing throughout this really does stick to the more high level and doing only one part of the value chain at least at this moment. And so I think the amount of new resources we have to solve these problems makes me more hopeful that we'll crack problems like the distribution problem that Rose was just talking about here and a number of other things. But I think we really do need to have ways that safeguard against continuing with the same side sorts of systemic injustice that we have and got us into the problem in the beginning. And I guess we'll just say to try to make that a little bit more down to the ground. I wanna be clear why I'm saying that a bit I respect what Anuj and Rose do so much is I just think that make ensuring that we have the voices of the most vulnerable and actually have their say built into these products is quite necessary. And I see that the types of products that we're building in the interest from the industry that we are getting as they ensure does not necessarily include really thoughtful necessarily thoughtful products about who should be taking what kind of risk what should be done by public financing what is appropriate for private financing what is actually better for private financing. And I really wanna make sure that we have various stakeholders at the table as we're having these even larger conversations that we do at Clark Street. Okay, thanks everybody. We're a little bit over time so I'll wrap up but thanks so much Anuj, Bessie, Rose it's a convenient last thing I'll mention is and I'm going to ultimate you guys here been part of the insure tech series that we just launched yesterday with case at Duke University so I'll pop the link in but we'll be releasing about six articles and deep dive into the insure tech and micro-insurance space over the coming month. And so if you wanna go deeper on the topic feel free to take a look the first article that was published yesterday and more to come. But thanks so much and everybody have a great rest of your day.


Welcome back to the AI for Good Global Summit here at the ITU headquarters in Geneva. One of the key sponsors of this event of course is Saudi Arabia. And I'm pleased to have with me the Deputy Minister of Technology, Industry and Digital Capabilities, Ahmad El-Tinyan, I hope I pronounced it well. Yes, it's my pleasure to be here in the AI for Good Global Summit and we are glad to be a partner with ITU in organizing this event. And we're committed to partner with ITU and work with the international community on the good use of AI and exploring solutions and collaboration regarding the same. Why is AI important for the Kingdom? Well, Saudi Arabia is undertaking the largest and the most ambitious economy reform and transformation called Vision 2030. This goes across nation, across society, as well as economy. And there are several programs for this major reform that the country has never ever encountered before. It's a big and ambitious plan and definitely digitization is a key enabler for this transformation and AI is a driving force for the same. We can see AI almost everywhere in most of our vision realisation programs. When you came here, what was your objective, would you say? First of all, as I mentioned to you, we are committed to partner with ITU and support all its initiative for the sustainable development goals for the United Nations. So one thing is to sponsor this event for the good use of AI. The other thing, we are part-spacing as part of the delegation. We are bringing some experts and entrepreneurs with us. The main objective is to exchange experience with other countries and other experts and also to share experience to come up with proper use of AI that hopefully we can use back in our realisation program for Vision 2030. You're returning home tomorrow. Would you say missions have been achieved, your objectives or goals reached? I would say it was a step towards achieving our goals. Still we are in a long journey in our Vision 2030. Still we are in a long journey in building mature digitisation enabler for Vision 2030. But events like this one, it's a great to build a collaboration network to share experience and to benefit from other experience. Really we benefit from this event and we are looking forward to have similar events in the future. Okay, well we look forward to having you back next time. Deputy Minister, thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much.


Associated Research Director of Origin Discovery Technologies, a software storey company based in Bangalore, India. These are my products, under the service of Mr. Arasimhan, who is the Director of Origin Sciences Department, and Arasimha Rao, who is the Christopher Field Department. This work described in this 14 cents article was carried out as part of a collaboration with the University of Mariah to develop antibacterial compounds to treat mediviruses. This is an infectious disease caused by the gram-active organism orchid-area pseudomaline that affects both humans and animals. This infection is recognized as an important health problem in southern stations, countries, and tropical north demonstration. Clinical manifestations of mediviruses include pneumonia with or without septicemia or localized infections involving the skin and the soft tissue organs. Current treatment options include self-tracidine or carbapenemosibutrosine for two weeks during the initial intensive phase of therapy, followed by 12 weeks of oral therapy. Apart from the long duration, another issue with this treatment is the reported drug resistance, which is the hallmark of bacterial infections. So, there is an urgent need for developing new drugs that function through novel mechanism of action, which is a challenging task. The parietic acid via synthesis pathway is a relatively unexplored area for antibacterial drug development. This pathway is unique in bacteria as compared to that in humans. In bacteria, individual enzymes catalyze each stage of parietic acid via synthesis, whereas a single multi-enzyme formulas mediate parietic acid synthesis in humans. Therefore, it is possible to selectively inhibit parietic acid via synthesis in bacteria without affecting that in humans. There are several enzymes in this pathway. Enoïdic pyrlectase, also known as papi, that catalyzes the final step in each cycle of bacterial parietic acid synthesis, utilizing NADH or NADPH as a papi drug, is known to be a critical enzyme for the survival of bacteria. Therefore, we initiated a project to develop inhibitors for papi, for drug development, and then work order is humanized in functions. So, several compounds inhibiting papi from different organisms have been identified, among which AFN1252 is one of the most advanced inhibitors in phase two clinical development, which is selected for gram-positive bacteria. In an effort to identify inhibitors of bercoultary of fabi, we screened several compounds using a biochemical assay, which was established with an inhose purified protein. To our surprise, we found AFN1252 to be a very potent inhibitor of BPM fabi, with an IC50 of around 9 nanomolar, and also this inhibitor showed antibacterial activity against bercoultary of pseudomalli R15 strain, which was isolated from patients with melidiosis. In order to understand the binding mode and the mechanism of action of binding, we conducted thermal melting temperature studies, kinetic studies, and also, it states To begin with, with thermal melting studies, we found that the AFN1252 compound stabilizes bercoultary of protein in the absence of cofactors NADH or NADPH. This binary mechanism of binding is different in contrast to the terminal mechanism reported elsewhere for fabi inhibitors in the presence of cofactor and the protein. Data from kinetic studies carried out by varying the substrate, protonal 4a and cofactor NADH at different concentrations of AFN1252 suggested a mixed mode of inhibition were able to obtain diffraction quality crystals. However, when we saw the structure, we observed that the density corresponding to NADH was not seen. To further explore the mechanism of binding, we saw the crystal structure of AFN1252 complex at a resolution of 2.3 angstrom and the data presented here gave clear evidence that a binary complex formation between AFN1252 and AFN1252 is possible. This is in contrast with all the earlier reported crystal structures of AFN1252, b with equal i, climaidia or staphylococcus, wherein the inhibitor binds to the enzyme in presence of the cofactor NADH. Fibium fabi AFN1252 complex for a symmetrical datametric structure with one molecule of AFN1252 go to each monomer of the BPM fabi. Hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic contacts and water-mediated interactions stabilize the binary complex formation. Thus the data presented in this article clearly indicates a novel mechanism of action for AFN1252 binding to BPM fabi. The structural and mechanistic insights from these studies might help in rational design and development of new fabi inhibitors to treat malaria disease. Thank you.