Montserrat Guillén, academician of the RAED, leads a working group that has received several awards for its innovative risk calculations

Montserrat Guillén, professor of Quantitative Methods for Economics and Business at the University of Barcelona (UB) and full academician of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED) has received the award for the best work presented at the international congress of insurance experts ICA Berlin 2018 for the article “The transition towards semi-autonomous vehicle insurance: contributions from usage-based data”, which she has been carried out together to various investigators of the Riskcenter-IREA of the UB.

The research on car insurance is one of the lines of work of the risk group “Risk in Finance and Insurance” of Riskcenter, which is recognized for its research in data science for risk quantification and actuarial sciences. The authors are pioneers in the formulation of insurance rates that take into account the behaviour of policyholders, for example based on telemetry devices that are installed in vehicles. Her work concludes that with automatic devices to control excess speed, the number of fatalities of traffic accidents could be reduced by more than 60%.

Dr Guillén was also recognized with the SCOR prize for work on telematics in vehicle insurance. This work proposes an innovative type of insurance that is paid on the basis of mileage to establish accurately the accident risk, instead of for a specific period, the criterion that is currently used. Within the same group of work of the UB, the academician has elaborated diverse studies to improve the evaluations of risk of the insurance companies, which begin to consider technologies like GPS or the analysis of Big Data to calculate the rates that apply to clients.