Descartes Underwriting: Next-gen climate risk insurance in collaboration with Google Workspace
About Descartes Underwriting
Founded in 2018, Descartes Underwriting offers a new generation of data-driven insurance against climate and emerging risks. Operating in over 60 countries, the company employs 150 people around the world.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usDescartes Underwriting chose Google Workspace to implement an effective and flexible policy allowing its 150 employees to work securely from anywhere.
Google Cloud results
- Meetings that are user-friendly and easy to organize
- Quick and easy management of security and entitlements
- Workflows that structure and speed up processes
- Eco-responsible practices that contribute to reducing the digital environmental footprint
Simplifying collaboration on an international scale
Descartes collaborates with brokers across the world to protect their corporate clients and governments against natural catastrophes, weather, and emerging risks, through a unique data- driven approach. Specializing in parametric insurance, the company offers its clients contracts that are based on predefined parameters and pre-agreed payout thresholds. Risks covered include flood, hurricanes, earthquakes, hail, spring frost, and other climate risks. It sets thresholds with its clients based on parameters such as water level or wind speed, and structures payouts based on exposure and risk appetite. Compensation is swiftly paid once the threshold has been exceeded.
Collaboration and climate risk on a global scale
This innovative company and new form of data-driven insurance has achieved great success.
Created in 2018, Descartes Underwriting achieved record fundraising of €107 million in 2022. Unlike the majority of its competitors, the company mainly works with large businesses. It already has more than 350 clients and 50% of its revenue comes from outside of Europe. The company opted to pursue international development right from the start by opening up offices in London, New York, Sydney, and even Singapore. To strengthen communication and collaboration between employees all over the world, it chose Google Workspace.
"The solution has been in place since the company was created," explains Patrick Mursch, CIO at Descartes Underwriting. "Google Workspace processes text, calendars, online messaging, video conferencing, and more, supporting our collaboration both internally and with our partners, in France and internationally." The company is particularly reliant on Google Meet, since its work relies heavily on meetings, so much so that remote work was already ingrained in company culture well before the pandemic.
"In reality, even when we are physically in the office, we tend to organize meetings through Google Meet since it connects to our calendars and helps us to easily find out each person’s availability. This avoids us having multiple calls and email exchanges to find a time when everyone is free," says Mursch. "Moreover, Google Meet offers many features that make our meetings easier to run, such as screen sharing."
"Google Workspace processes text, calendars, online messaging, video conferencing, and more, supporting our collaboration both internally and with our partners, in France and internationally."
—Patrick Mursch, CIO at Descartes UnderwritingSimplicity and enhanced security
Selected for its cloud-native design that provides immediate access to tools, Google Workspace is enjoyed by users and IT teams alike. Most users were already using the collaborative suite themselves, which made the learning process much easier. As for the IT teams, they welcomed a perfectly integrated suite that required no deployment and that greatly simplified security management. "Some entitlements are defined using Single Sign-On (SSO), including for the other Google Cloud services that we use. This centralization makes controlling access to data, and more generally the security of our IT system, considerably simpler," states Mursch. It also simplifies the onboarding of new employees. All that has to be done is adding their profile to grant them immediate access to all the tools they need to work. "User management is much easier and faster with Google’s Single Sign-On," adds Mursch.
As a company committed to promoting sustainable development, Descartes Underwriting is also very aware of the best practices integrated into Google Workspace that help to reduce their digital environmental footprint, such as sharing files in Drive rather than attaching them to emails. "Similarly, information is available and shared in Workspace, thus avoiding data duplication which consumes both storage space and resources during transfer," explains Mursch.
Increasing usage
Over time, uses of the productivity suite have diversified. In particular, Descartes Underwriting uses Google Workspace to create workflows and forms that structure processes and allow employees to save a large amount of time. For example, the IT department set up forms to manage user requests to access a service, or to allow them to report incidents using features within Google Forms.
At the same time, the IT department is making the most of the numerous integrations that Google Workspace has with third-party solutions to expand its range of tools and/or to streamline its processes, including instant messaging and CI/CD pipeline solutions. Again, authentication and entitlements are managed via Google’s SSO. "This centralization is very practical for both admins and users, who can move between apps without having to sign in each time. In addition, these integrations with external applications save time as they don’t have to be developed internally" adds Mursch. "In other words, we are more productive and efficient with Google Workspace, while also benefiting from a work environment that is both user friendly and incredibly secure."
"We are more productive and efficient with Google Workspace, while also benefiting from a work environment that is both user friendly and incredibly secure."
—Patrick Mursch, CIO at Descartes UnderwritingTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Descartes Underwriting
Founded in 2018, Descartes Underwriting offers a new generation of data-driven insurance against climate and emerging risks. Operating in over 60 countries, the company employs 150 people around the world.