The launch comes at a moment of acute market focus on SRCC risk. Insured losses from civil unrest events have risen sharply in recent years, driven by an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment, yet the analytical tools available to the market have not kept pace.
London:Howden Re, the global reinsurance, capital markets and strategic advisory arm of Howden and Synthetik Insurance Technologies, a global leader in modelling political violence and terrorism perils, today announce the launch of UNREST through an exclusive partnership.
UNREST is an analytics capability building on Synthetik’s groundbreaking srccQuantum and is specifically designed to help insurers and reinsurers better understand, quantify, and manage strikes, riots and civil commotion (SRCC) risk.
The capability combines property-level analytics and dynamic event simulation to provide a more granular view of SRCC exposure and potential loss scenarios. Designed to support underwriting, portfolio management and reinsurance decision-making, it helps users identify concentrations of risk, assess accumulation potential, and understand the potential impact of SRCC events across portfolios.
The launch comes at a moment of acute market focus on SRCC risk. Insured losses from civil unrest events have risen sharply in recent years, driven by an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment, yet the analytical tools available to the market have not kept pace.
Unlike natural catastrophe perils, SRCC events do not follow consistent historical patterns: they are shaped by political dynamics, urban geography and the speed of social mobilisation, making scenario-based modelling essential. While traditional approaches rely on broad geographic assessments or aggregate loss data, UNREST generates realistic event scenarios and models their potential impact at the property level, providing more localised insight across portfolios.
The Howden Re Marine, Energy & Terror team is undertaking a model enhancement process to bring real value and significant benefits to reinsurers, as well as insurance clients. UNREST is the first model capable of quantifying existing market event definitions for SRCC.
It will give both parties clear insight into the potential loss quantum associated with the variance in the radii / hour clauses that make up current occurrence wordings.
Andrew Foot, Managing Director, Howden Re, said: “SRCC has become an increasingly important consideration for insurers and reinsurers, but the tools available to assess the risk have struggled to keep pace with how these events actually unfold.”
“UNREST sets a new standard for how this risk is assessed and managed. By pairing Howden Re’s market expertise with Synthetik’s modelling technology, we are giving both clients and Reinsurers, a far more granular view of exposure, accumulation, and potential loss at the property level. That means better-informed underwriting, sharper portfolio management, and a clear advantage over those still relying on tools that were not built for how SRCC risk actually behaves,”he said.
Synthetik CEO Brian Watson said: “Modelling SRCC risk with real precision has long been a challenge for the industry, partly because these events don’t follow the kind of consistent historical patterns that other perils do. Our approach generates realistic event routes and footprints at the property level, rather than relying solely on broad historical or demographic trends.”