Biography of Ryan Bank
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Kris Wagner
kris.wagner@vexcelgroup.com
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Ryan Bank is the Global Managing Director and Founder of the Geospatial Insurance Consortium (GIC) and serves on the Board of Advisors of Vexcel.
The GIC, the world’s largest aerial imagery program, was born out of the need for immediate and rapid insight into disasters, specifically for the insurance industry. Creating the GIC as a one-of-a-kind geospatial program came directly from Ryan’s expertise in strategic short and long-term disaster planning and preparation. His vision centers around revolutionizing how insurers can better serve policyholders—while simultaneously growing their book of business—through location-based information. It provides a comprehensive disaster response not just to insurers, but to emergency management organizations as well, delivering ultra-high resolution aerial imagery within hours of a catastrophe. The program’s innovative approach to disaster response provides critical situational awareness at a level of detail not found anywhere else, helping save lives and begin the recovery and restoration to impacted communities around the world. Not only does it give emergency managers vital ground truth, the disaster imagery also enhances insurers’ capabilities to proactively begin and resolve claims with impacted policyholders.
Beyond his role with the GIC and Vexcel, Ryan serves several intergovernmental organizations including the UN Office of Disaster Risk Reduction as a Private Sector Representative. There, he represents insurance industry interests in determining risk and expanding insurance access to the most vulnerable populations.
Ryan travels extensively throughout each year, serving as a featured speaker at global conferences and forums focused on emerging technologies and digital solutions for the insurance industry and government entities. He’s consulted with over 25 foreign governments and militaries, advised executive leadership at organizations such as BP, the Office of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs, and US Southern Command on how to leverage imagery-as-a-service and geospatial data to save lives and create sustainable, achievable plans using emerging technologies.
A key highlight showcasing Ryan’s decades of experience in digital solutions involved developing a social data monitoring system in 2010. It was deployed by the US Coast Guard to save countless lives following the Haiti earthquake. This system found and identified hundreds of thousands of distress messages, creating actionable intelligence rescue teams used to find survivors trapped in the rubble of multiple buildings destroyed by the earthquake.
Ryan holds a Bachelor of Philosophy in Communications from Northwestern University, where he graduated Cum Laude and was inducted into the Alpha Sigma Lambda Honor Society.
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