About RMS
Hemant H. Shah
Our Story
They said it couldn't be done. We thought otherwise.
As a graduate student at Stanford, in the heart of earthquake country, I wrote a business plan to spin out university R&D and commercialize a computer model that could quantify earthquake risk in three California cities. With a modest seed investment from my family and an office in my apartment, I convinced a few friends and fellow researchers to join up. Believe me, there was no shortage of skeptics. The financial industry and academic establishment told us that the problem warranted endless study in traditional silos. Venture capitalists struggled to understand what the category and business model would be ("catastrophe risk modeling?"). Fortunately, we were naïve and had the absolute conviction that if we got the right multidisciplinary team in the room, we could create a whole new category of analytic technology—and launch a new industry.
More than two decades later, we are now the world leader in catastrophic risk modeling. From earthquakes and hurricanes to terrorism and infectious diseases, our models provide critical risk management solutions to hundreds of financial institutions around the world. At RMS, we believe knowledge is power. Our work may serve some of the leading industries driving today's global economy, but we also believe it can make a real and positive impact on people's lives. How societies understand and manage risk affects us all. At RMS, our ultimate goal is to help create a more sustainable and resilient global society through a better understanding of catastrophic events.
Based in our headquarters in Silicon Valley and in offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, our team of nearly a thousand professionals may be a bit larger than it used to be, but we're as ambitious and innovative as ever. From day one, our passion has been innovation driven by the courage to tackle the problems others say can't be solved. Can we quantify the risks from climate change? Simulate how medical breakthroughs might lead to dramatic improvements in life expectancy? Deliver supercomputing in the cloud? Can our technology platform help transform an entire industry? Once again, they say it can't be done. We think otherwise.
Hemant Shah
Cofounder, President and CEO
San Francisco, California, 2011
Leadership Team
- Hemant H. Shah
- President and
Chief Executive Officer - California, US
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Hemant Shah is President and CEO of Risk Management Solutions. Since co-founding RMS in 1989, Hemant has become widely recognized within the global insurance industry as a proactive and influential leader. Based in California, he was named one of North America's "100 Most Powerful People in the Insurance Industry" (Insurance Newscast, 2005, 2006), one of "35 Rising Stars" (Business Insurance, 2002), a "Leader of the Future" (Global Reinsurance, 2000) and also listed as one of the industry's Top 40 Most Influential (Global Reinsurance, 2008). Hemant serves on the Board of Overseers of St. John's School of Risk Management and Actuarial Science (College of Insurance), is a Director of the RAND Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, a Director on the Board of RAND's Institute for Civil Justice, and a Director of the Singapore-based Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies. Hemant is a member of the Aspen Institute's prestigious Henry Crown Fellowship Program, which seeks to develop our next generation of community-spirited leaders, providing them with the tools necessary to meet the challenges of corporate and civic leadership in the 21st century. He received a BS in Civil Engineering and an MS in Engineering Management from Stanford University.
- Robert Bentley
- Chief Operating Officer
- New Jersey, US
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Rob Bentley joined RMS as the COO in May 2007. In this role, Rob is responsible for all operational aspects of RMS and oversees RMS' execution of a multi-market, multi-business, and multi-platform strategy. Rob is a highly effective leader with an execution mindset and a track record of driving world class performance in the insurance and reinsurance markets. Rob began his career at Guy Carpenter & Company, LLC. in 1987 as a property broker. In 1993, he moved to Aon Re, a global reinsurance and insurance brokerage firm, where he managed a team of property brokers placing national account property risk, catastrophe, and retrocessional business. He returned to Guy Carpenter in 1996 as a founding member of the company's property specialty division. In 2000, Rob assumed leadership of Guy Carpenter's Instrat risk modeling operations. In 2002, he was chosen for the role of Western Region Manager, and then assumed the position of Global Chief Operating Officer in 2006. Rob holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He also attended the Stanford Executive Program at Stanford University.
- Debbie Byron
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Chief Human Resources
Officer - California, US
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Deborah (Debbie) Byron is the Chief Human Resources Officer of RMS. She is a seasoned global executive with over 30 years of experience in corporate businesses, professional service companies, and educational institutions. Prior to joining RMS, Debbie was SVP of worldwide human resources for SAP Business Objects. She has also held executive leadership positions for the international law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and the California State Automobile Association, and as principal of her own organizational consulting practice. Debbie serves as co-chair of the Stanford Women on Boards Initiative and as a trustee of Harvey Mudd College. She also previously chaired the board of directors of the Career Action Center in Cupertino, and as a two-term president of the 15,000-student, top-ranked Cupertino Union School District. Debbie holds a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
- Stephen Robertson
- Chief Finance Officer
- California, US
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Steve Robertson is the CFO of RMS, and also holds the role of Executive Vice President of Enterprise Services. He joined RMS in 2001 after prior positions as CFO of COLO.com, a telecom infrastructure company, and CFO of InsWeb, an online insurance marketplace, where he managed the company's initial public offering (IPO). Prior to InsWeb, Steve spent 12 years in the investment banking business, focusing primarily on capital raising, mergers and acquisitions in the global insurance and reinsurance industry at firms now part of Citicorp (Salomon Brothers/Smith Barney), Deutsche Bank (Alex. Brown) and Lehman Brothers. Steve holds an AB from Princeton University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
- Philippe Stephan
- Chief Technology Officer
- California, US
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Philippe Stephan is the CTO of RMS. Prior to joining RMS in 2009, he was most recently Head of Business Development for Sophis, a leading market risk technology vendor. Prior to Sophis, Philippe directed product development as the CTO of San Francisco based Moody's KMV, the award winning credit risk analytics vendor. Philippe has also held senior management positions at Internet startups, built derivatives risk management systems for Societe Generale in Paris, and CA Lazard Financial Product Bank in London. Philippe started his career as a key contributor to the development of the Eiffel programming language in the early 1990s, after obtaining his MS in computer science from French Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de St Etienne.
- Robert Muir-Wood
- Chief Research Officer
- London, UK
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Robert Muir-Wood is CRO of Science and Technology Research at RMS. In this role, Robert heads the branch of RMS responsible for enhancing approaches to natural catastrophe modeling and developing models for new areas of risk such as liability. Based in London, he has more than 20 years' experience in developing probabilistic catastrophe models and has most recently focused on the clustering of catastrophic events, insurance loss amplification, and "mega" catastrophes. Robert was lead author on Insurance, Finance, and Climate Change for the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report, and is the author of six books, as well as numerous papers and articles in scientific and industry publications. Robert has recently focused on new models for clustering, time varying activity rates, loss amplification and Super Cats. He is also a member of the OECD High Level Advisory Board of the International Network on Financial Management of Large-Scale Catastrophes. He holds a first class degree in natural sciences and a PhD in Earth Sciences, both from Cambridge University, and was a junior research fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.