WeatherBill is live!
Weather is unpredictable.
Your bottom line doesn’t have to be.Buy a Weather Contract and WeatherBill will pay you when weather conditions that may impact your business occur. We can pay you for rainy days that may keep your customers away, a heat wave that may impact buying habits of customers, or even a frost that may decrease the yield on your crop – you can customize a Contract to suit your needs.
Not sure if the weather affects your business? Learn more about weather risk or use our free tools to analyze your weather sensitivity.
While only eligible US counterparties can become customers today, I’d encourage anyone with an interest in any or all of weather, derivatives, gui’s and/or user centered design, to have a look and especially to play around with the educational and pricing tools. As JD and Mehmet commented on my earlier post, one key to successfully selling risk management products to businesses is to make it as easy, intuitive and directly explicitly relevant as possible. ie Get rid of all the financial jargon and theoretical examples and paraphrasing Rod Tidwell – show them the money! And give the customers the tools – put them in the drivers seat. Call me old fashioned but nobody likes buying something they don’t understand.
If you don’t think this is revolutionary, I know of senior derivatives trading managers that refuse to give their own sales people access to their modelling tools, let alone giving customers access. Based on an information arbitrage business model, this actually makes perfect sense. Only thing is, (imho) in a connected online world, an information arbitrage business model just isn’t going to work anymore. I’m not suggesting that WeatherBill is entirely unique in providing their customers with the tools to help themselves but it is one of a new wave of financial services firms that has this ethos built in from the start. In any event, I’m willing to bet it’s a trend that has legs.
(Disclaimer: as previously noted I am an investor in WeatherBill.)
***Update***
Red Herring article quotes David:
“It’s incredibly hard today for small and midsized businesses to access the types of financial products that are available to very large buyers,” said WeatherBill’s Mr. Friedberg. “We think applying this technology to these markets can open up access and liquidity.”
