InsTech - insurance & innovation with Matthew Grant & Robin Merttens David Wood, JBA Risk Management & Jochen Papenbrock, NVIDIA: Showing the world how to revolutionise modelling (388)
Jan 4, 2026
In this discussion, David Wood, Managing Director at JBA Risk Management, and Jochen Papenbrock, Head of Financial Technology (EMEA) at NVIDIA, delve into the groundbreaking use of AI in flood modeling. They reveal how NVIDIA's GPU technology has revolutionized catastrophe analytics by enabling high-resolution simulations and ensemble methods. The duo explains the importance of running thousands of simulations to capture extreme weather events, the advantages of real-time modeling during floods, and how open-source tools are making these innovations accessible.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
GPUs Were The Catalyst For Modern AI
- NVIDIA's GPU + CUDA stack unlocked deep learning by massively speeding model training.
- Faster training let researchers expose models to far more data, boosting accuracy and enabling modern AI.
Early GPU Bet Enabled National Flood Maps
- JBA began GPU-accelerated flood simulation development in the early 2000s and formed JBA Risk Management in 2012.
- That innovation enabled national five-meter resolution flood maps and global catastrophe models used by the UK insurance market.
AI Weather Models Make Large Ensembles Feasible
- Physics-informed AI weather models deliver orders-of-magnitude acceleration versus full numerical simulation.
- That speed makes previously infeasible large ensembles and richer event sets practical for catastrophe modelling.