Hey all, 

I hope you had a good Bank Holiday weekend! It’s slightly scary to realise it’s now September. The days are feeling cooler and autumn is fast approaching… as too are SERI deadlines.

As an experiment we will be posting our SERI updates on the Icebreaker One website as well as sending an email out (e.g. https://icebreakerone.org/2020/08/28/seri-update-20200824/). Please do let us know if that is either a concern for you, or if it becomes a useful way to find information!

1. Overall Programme Updates

Hopefully, everyone has received an invitation to the all-SERI partner call on 8th Sept. This meeting will be to discuss the road-map Jannah and Frank are working on to ensure we deliver a climate ready-financial product by mid-November. Let me know if you haven’t received your invite, and I’ll make sure you get added! 

We’re keen to give you as much notice as possible for the all-SERI partner meetings on 5th October and 5th November. To help us with this, could you fill in these two doodle polls by Monday next week, so we can find the most suitable time slots [LINKS REDACTED]

2. Key Upcoming Dates

4th Sept (16:30 – 17:00) – Icebreaker One Show & Tell. We have a spare slot if anyone wants to present anything?

8th Sept (10:30-11:30) – All-partner meeting, to give you a chance to hear more about the product road map. We’ll be sending pre-reading on the 4th. 

2nd Oct –  Submission date for UKRI progress report

5th October – All-partner SERI meeting. Time TBC

5th November – All-partner SERI meeting. Time TBC

3. Policy

Jannah wrote and submitted Icebreaker One’s response to the Treasury Committee’s inquiry into Decarbonisation and Green Finance: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/96/decarbonisation-and-green-finance/.

I’ve attached our submission.Please do not share it with others outside of your immediate teams until the Committee has published the evidence they received.

4. Product Innovation

Frank and Jannah continue to work on the details of the product innovation framework. This includes fleshing out a draft process for taking an idea through a series of stages to validate it while adding sufficient detail for a partner to take over its development. We will talk through the process at the September 8th meeting, along with our plans for taking the existing ideas through the process.

We also continue to work with Jeremy, Srini and Martin on identifying how risks relate to insurance categories, as part of helping us understand where insurance opportunities may lie.

5. Coming soon….

We have some great blogs ready to publish that Jannah, Vichi, Lily, and Jeremy have written on all things insurance and innovation. Please keep an eye out for those on our website and I’ll link to them in a future update. Any help to disseminate this content would be gratefully received!

Jeremy has been doing a deep dive into how we can leverage the bond market for insurance. He will be sharing the outputs of this over the next few weeks. Get in contact with Jeremy (jeremy@icebreakerone.org) if you are interested in seeing what he’s been working on.

6. And finally…. 

Thanks for getting to the end. As ever, I appreciate your thoughts and feedback about these updates, and how they should improve

I’ll leave you with this data visualization which, showing how much electricity various energy plants create: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/mega-what-the-worlds-biggest-and-most-notable-power-plants/. I love nicely designed data visualization, as it can make it easier to tell powerful stories to wider audiences. If you see any good data viz related to the scale of the challenges faced by the insurance sector, could you please let me know? I’d be keen to help promote it!

Until next week, 
Michelle (and the Icebreakers)