Congratulations to the winning team:
Timo Schmid, Valentin Gebhart, and David N. Bresch, whose pioneering work exemplifies the spirit of innovation, collaboration, and impact that the Swiss Risk Award seeks to recognize.
On 6 November 2025, during our flagship event “AI in Finance: Risk, Regulation, and Responsibility & Swiss Risk Award 2025” held at the University of Zürich AULA, the Swiss Risk Association proudly presented this year’s Swiss Risk Award to the project “Improved Real-Time Hail Damage Estimates — Leveraging Dense Crowdsourced Observations.”
Their project introduces a breakthrough approach to hail damage estimation by combining crowdsourced hail reports from the MeteoSwiss app with radar data and advanced clustering techniques. This method produces a spatially consistent hail size dataset that significantly enhances the accuracy and granularity of hail damage assessments. By moving beyond traditional radar-only models, their research enables better identification of localized, high-impact areas, providing invaluable support for risk assessment and disaster management.
A follow-up initiative is already in development, aiming to integrate this model into an operational web application for cantonal building insurers. This application will deliver real-time estimates of expected losses, supporting more efficient post-event response, communication, and decision-making.
The award was presented by Anton Seidel, Board Member of the Swiss Risk Association and Financial Markets Reinsurance at Swiss Re.
We also extend our warm congratulations to all finalists, who presented equally innovative and inspiring projects that highlight the depth and diversity of the Swiss risk management community.
Finally, we wish to express our sincere gratitude to the Award Committee and Judging Panel for their commitment, expertise, and careful evaluation:
- Roger Müller, Basel Land Kantonal Bank — Board of Directors
- Monica Mächler, Former Zurich Insurance — Board of Directors (through 2025)
- Dominic Rau, Scor — Head Strategic Risk, Board Member
- Volker Gloe, Cembra Bank — Chief Risk Officer
- Prof. Josef Teichmann, ETH Zürich — Department of Mathematics
- Jean-Christophe Pernollet, Swissquote — Board Member
The Swiss Risk Association congratulates the winners and thanks the entire community for another year of outstanding contributions to the advancement of risk management and analytics in Switzerland.
| Finalist in the Top 5: | Project: (Description) | ||||
| Nominees: Antonello Cirulli, Gianluca De Nard, Joshua Traut, Patrick S. Walker OLZ | Low Risk, High Variability: Practical Guide for Portfolio Construction Provides a practical, cost-aware guide for constructing investable low-risk portfolios, addressing the challenges of methodological uncertainty and nonstandard errors that hinder implementation in real-world institutional contexts • A comprehensive analysis is conducted using thousands of portfolio variations, different risk estimators, weighting schemes, rebalancing intervals, and transaction cost models, with each modelling choice’s impact quantified through out-of-sample performance metrics. • Key findings reveal that weighting scheme has the largest effect on performance, followed by how transaction costs and risk estimators are handled; cost realism is critical, as high-turnover approaches erode net returns. • Clear heuristics emerge: total-volatility sorting and equal-weighting (with careful cost management) are robust, most long-only portfolios outperform the benchmark after costs, and decision-fork analysis brings new rigour to portfolio construction. | ||||
| Nominees: Achille Yomi, Emanuele Dri, Cedric Kuassivi, Muthumanimaran Vetrivelan ScenarioX | QVAR by Scenario X, a quantum approach to estimate Value at Risk Introduces a quantum-based approach to financial risk management, addressing the limitations of traditional Monte Carlo simulations in modelling tail risk and capturing market volatility. • Utilises quantum hardware to generate truly random numbers, eliminating biases from pseudo-random generators and improving the accuracy of Value at Risk (VaR) estimates. • Experiments using quantum-enhanced simulations on a 40-equity portfolio demonstrate more reliable risk metrics, with reduced standard deviations and tighter confidence intervals for VaR • SaaS platform integrates quantum and AI technologies for dynamic risk analytics, supporting stress testing, capital optimisation, and paving the way for future financial innovations such as climate risk modelling. | ||||
| Nominees: Carmen B. Steinmann, Tanja N. Dallafior, David N. Bresch ETH Zurich CelsiusPro | Innovating wildfire risk transfer through remote sensing Seeks to innovate wildfire risk transfer using remote sensing and open-source tools. • Recent years seeing a surge in insured losses and growing concerns about insurability and disaster recovery. • The team integrates remote sensing data with the CLIMADA platform to systematically assess fire datasets, estimate global exposure, and develop parametric insurance frameworks that enable transparent, rapid payouts. • The project has delivered globally consistent exposure estimates and an open-source insurance framework, enhancing transparency and financial resilience, with future plans to extend these solutions for improved disaster preparedness and equitable risk transfer. | ||||
| Nominees: Bernhard Rannegger, Alex Sidorenko & team ScyAI | ScyAI – Your Autonomous Risk & Insurance Intelligence team Addresses mispricing in insurance risk assessments by moving beyond generic regional and industry categories, instead providing site-specific analysis using digital risk twins and physics-based simulations. • The platform generates detailed loss distributions and business interruption metrics for individual sites, helping risk managers negotiate fairer premiums and optimise insurance structures based on real data. • Enables transparent modelling of risk mitigation strategies, ranking interventions by their cost-effectiveness and supporting evidence-based investment in resilience measures. • Clients typically achieve 30–50% reductions in insurance premiums, while the platform’s integrated approach to risk quantification, transfer, and mitigation analysis promotes a more resilient and data-driven economy. |