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Riskscape maps the future

Published • 30 September 2021

Riskscape, a specialist actuarial modelling company, has turned demographic and asset locations into data gold mines. The company builds intuitive, effective spatial location intelligence in South Africa. Mapping the locations of properties, ownership and risk features, it has answered questions for property, financial and insurance sectors. These questions include everything from property worth, the average income of property owners, mortgage risk and the effect of climate change on the bottom line. The solutions effectively enhance the information available for assessing components of financing and insurance of properties, and levels the information playing field between buyers and sellers. However, this market innovator needed a solution that would enable its growth (estimated to be significant within the year) and not limit its potential – a solution as innovative as the company itself.

The Challenge

“Location intelligence over fixed assets enables us to do a thousand different things,” explains Heinrich Schoombie, Riskscape Director. However, the company needed an environment to support this possibility. Riskscape needed to find a way to expand its services, with 24/7 access to its offerings and bank-grade security to ensure the protection of confidential information.

“We have products, APIs and map controls that our clients integrate into their systems and workflow. A bank call centre agent, for instance, just needs an address to zoom into the map where the customer lives. The agent can then confirm that customer is the owner of the property by using the company’s system to match the information provided with the deeds data. The agent can also pick up all the variables that predict the risk on that property so that they can provide mortgage rates, for example. We needed to have a solution that was online 24/7 to support this.”

The Solution

Riskscape consulted Synthesis Software Technologies, a software development and consulting company known for innovative solutions that help companies safely scale and innovate. “As we onboard bigger banks and more insurance houses, we need to have a more robust environment, maintaining security while delivering unfettered performance.” Synthesis now supports Riskscape’s AWS Cloud environment and provides associated tooling, assisting the Riskscape support staff to keep the platform available while innovating and changing the platform where required.

The Result

Through Synthesis’ managed services team of AWS Cloud experts, Riskscape is ensured of a stable environment and its team is freed up time to focus on its strategy for expansion and innovation. The environment now minimises obstacles to releasing new functioning with the use of infrastructure as code (IaC) and DevOps best practises so Riskscape can innovate at pace. Riskscape has peace of mind with well-architected security guardrails and incident detection, ensuring security and compliance with POPI, amongst other regulations and standards. It also has cost management flexibility to ensure there is no bill shock. “We’re very happy with Synthesis. As we grow to access more of its services, it gives us peace of mind that we know there is a large supporting company that can help us out if we have issues.”

The partnership has been so successful that the companies have been recommending each other’s services on to their clients and finding ways to work together and combine their data expertise. More organisations are understanding the importance of geo-tagged data and the need for tools that can successfully combine location data with business metrics to provide intelligent outputs that are beyond a simple map. With this increasing demand, Riskscape’s unique offering and its exceptional talent pool, all supported for growth, “the future looks bright.”

“We're very happy with Synthesis. As we grow to access more of its services, it gives us peace of mind that we know there is a large supporting company that can help us out if we have issues.”

Heinrich Schoombie

Director at Riskcape