Six insurtech start-ups will pitch their industry-disrupting business models during the GR Innovation & Insurtech conference, which is being held at Rosewood Bermuda on Monday.

And the start-up entrepreneurs will only have five minutes each to impress a panel of judges that their proposed idea is the best.

The session is one of a number of intriguing items on the agenda at the one-day conference, which is being staged on the island for the first time.

Hamilton Insurance Group is lead sponsor of the event, which is being brought to Bermuda by Global Reinsurance.

Supporting sponsors are the Bermuda Business Development Agency and PlugandPlay, which also sponsors the StartUps Live competition. Judges for the competition are Dermot O’Donohoe, Hamilton’s CEO at Lloyd’s, Julia Henderson, senior vice-president of Brit Global Specialty, and Laura Taylor, managing partner and CFO at Nephila Capital.

Kathleen Reardon, CEO of Hamilton Re, said: “We’re delighted that this inaugural conference has attracted six of the most interesting insurtech start-ups in the market today.

“Each fledgeling business will have just five minutes to convince our judges and conference attendees that they have the best business case. After a vigorous grilling by our three judges, the audience will use innovative voting software to choose the winning pitch.”

While John Narraway, the BDA’s consultant for emerging technologies, said: “The BDA has been working for several months with PlugandPlay and their current cohort of insurtech start-ups to see which companies would have a natural fit with the Bermuda market.

“While the start-ups are in Bermuda, we’re arranging one-on-one meetings for them with experts here in the areas of capital structures, regulation and risk modelling. This will maximise their time and hopefully lead to a longer-term presence on the island.”

The six insurtech start-ups participating in the GR Innovation & Insurtech conference are:

• Carpe Data, which provides next generation predictive scoring and data products to P&C and life insurance companies by leveraging the social web, online content, and other forms of alternative data. Carpe Data’s products enable insurers to more accurately predict risks and innovate with new products to meet changing customer needs.

• DataRobot offers an automated machine learning platform that empowers users of all skill levels to make better predictions faster. Incorporating a library of hundreds of the most powerful open source machine learning algorithms, the DataRobot platform automates, trains and evaluates predictive models in parallel, delivering more accurate predictions at scale. DataRobot provides the fastest path to data science success for organisations of all sizes.

• Extraordinary Re Holdings Inc (!Re) is creating a new marketplace where insurance liabilities can be traded. The platform will unlock $20+ trillion of existing liabilities held on insurance company balance sheets, access new sources of reinsurance capacity that is expert in pricing and managing dynamic risks, create price discovery for liabilities that are difficult to value, and enable institutional investors to access diversifying and attractive sources of return. It is the next step in the evolution of insurance-linked securities.

• HazardHub helps insurance professionals understand the hazard risk of a property. HazardHub’s third-generation geospatial risk files are created by converting very large data sets of long-run hazard data into information that can be used to make informed decisions about the probability and severity of specific risks. The company puts every risk in a specific geographic area into a property “report card” that provides a comprehensive view of what might go wrong in your chosen property. HazardHub’s goal is to combine the best geographic hazard data available with lightning fast data access tools that make it easy, fast and inexpensive to access that data.

• Understory detects rain, hail, wind and other weather events directly at the earth’s surface, where the risk to life and property is greatest. While traditional, radar-enabled weather centres collect data by analysing conditions observed in the atmosphere, Understory’s ground-truth-based detection is a marked enhancement in both resolution and fidelity, providing real time data sets and graphical views of the movement and intensity of weather events, which leads to better insight and early detection of risks. The data applications for Understory’s sensors are enormous, as $485 billion of the US economy fluctuates with weather. This new, sensor-enabled big data will impact insurance, agriculture, broadcast, and many other industries.

• Omniscience’s software solutions help insurers and banks grow revenues, increase return on equity, reduce risk, and satisfy regulators. Omniscience Underwriting and Omniscience Capital Management solutions are uniquely powered by Omniscience Brute Force Analytics.

Ms Reardon and Kathleen Faries, Tokio Millennium Re’s head of Bermuda, will discuss what it takes to be successful in the digital age, during a fireside chat, titled “A new kind of company for a new kind of world”.

Other sessions on the agenda include “The Road to Modernisation: how insurance core technology is changing,” a presentation by Dan Woods, CEO of Socotra, and “Win the War for the IoT,” a presentation by Craig Hollingworth, co-founder of Concirrus.

Information about registering to attend the GR Innovation & Insurtech conference can be found at http://bii.globalreinsurance.com/bii-17/