New Software Product: CoMeta

New Software Product: CoMeta

New Software Product: CoMeta 150 150 Praedicat

We are delighted to announce the launch of the new Praedicat website to coincide with the launch of our new software product: CoMeta. We have high hopes for CoMeta. We believe that it will help our clients to profitably manage their casualty risks more effectively, while making the world cleaner, safer, and healthier at the same time. But more on that elsewhere. Let’s talk about the name.

Some of you have been using our beta software, which we called Strategic Underwriter. We decided that the Strategic Underwriter name was limiting in that there is more that can be done with the software than underwriting, such as portfolio management. It was also limiting in that it didn’t create a particularly compelling precedent for our product line: What would we call our next product? Diligent Risk Manager? Anyway you cut it, the name was, well, dull.

Comets, on the other hand, are exciting. Blazing through the nighttime sky on its way toward a rendezvous with the sun, countless eyes turn toward the sky to watch it and to contemplate what risks its arrival foretells. So keeping in line with the Latin theme in the name Praedicat (to advise or foretell), we decided to go with “Cometa,” which is Latin for comet.

Besides being an ancient symbol of emerging risk, Cometa had other associations that we like. The number one thing: two tails. As you may know, comets have both an ion tail and a dust tail. Since our software is intended to help our clients think about the risk of casualty catastrophe, the two-tail analogy is powerful. The science of managing Property catastrophe, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, involves analysis of the “tail risk,” which is how large is the probability of a large-scale (or “tail”) event? Casualty, on the other hand, talks about another kind of tail, namely the risk that an insurance policy written today will result in a claim many years in the future. This is referred to as the long tail. Casualty catastrophe involves the convergence of two kinds of tails, the large-scale event with claims that are paid many years after the policy is written. It is a two-tailed event. Like a comet!

Incidentally, we considered calling the software Nekomata, which is a Japanese mythological two-tailed man-eating cat. We love the name, but it is too long for a software product. We’ll figure out another way to use it.

CoMeta also captured something about our technology. Embedded in the word is “Meta” (we added the capitalization so that it wasn’t subtle). We use metadata from science to model the risk.

One more thing about Comets. They come from a distant part of our solar system called the Oort Cloud. CoMeta, too, is cloud-based.

Ideally, a product name should tell the world a story about the product, and CoMeta nailed it.