Riskthinking.AI builds the platform Canada’s financial regulator chose to stress-test the country’s mortgage system. Here is what it means for the rest of us, from a Halifax restaurant owner to a Calgary logistics firm.
If you ran a business through the 2024 wildfire season, the 2023 Halifax floods, or the 2021 heat dome in British Columbia, you already know that climate risk is not a future problem. It is a Tuesday-morning problem. It shows up as a closed highway, a spoiled inventory of fresh produce, an insurance renewal that doubles, a supplier in Quebec whose plant is shut down for a week, or a mortgage holder in your customer base who can no longer get coverage on the house they live in.
For most Canadian SMEs, the response to that uncertainty has been to absorb it. raise prices a little, take on more debt, and hope the next year is quieter. That worked when extreme weather events were extreme.It does not work when they are routine.
What has changed is that the data and tools to measure this risk, down to a specific address, a specific hazard, a specific decade, now exist. And one of the most advanced platforms in the world for doing that is Canadian.
The Canadian company global companies already use
Riskthinking.AI is headquartered at 392 Markham Street in Toronto. It was founded by Dr. Ron Dembo, the mathematician who previously built Algorithmics, the risk software company that Toronto produced, and IBM eventually bought. The company’s intellectual property, including the patented Dembo Method for climate scenario modelling, is Canadian-owned.
Three credentials tell you most of what you need to know about whether to take this company seriously.
- OSFI, the federal financial regulator, chose Riskthinking.AI as the sole data provider for Canada’s first national climate stress test. Roughly $3.9 trillion in Canadian mortgage and insured property exposure was stress-tested using its platform, covering more than 100 federally regulated banks and insurers.
- Bloomberg took an equity stake in 2022 and now distributes Riskthinking.AI data through the Bloomberg Terminal to roughly 350,000 market participants worldwide. The Terminal is what professional asset managers, banks, and traders use to decide where capital goes.
- Chartis Research ranks Riskthinking.AI 8th in its global Top 50 list of climate-risk vendors — the only Canadian company on it, surrounded by firms many times its size.
In other words: when the regulator that oversees Canada’s banking system needed a platform to quantify climate risk against the country’s biggest pool of mortgage debt, it did not buy that platform from London, New York, or Zürich. It bought it from Toronto.
Why this matters for a small business
Here is the connection most coverage of climate-risk software misses. The same data layer that tells a bank whether the mortgages on a Sudbury subdivision are exposed to flood risk also tells the people who live in that subdivision, and the businesses that serve them, the same thing. The underlying model does not care whether the customer is OSFI or a homeowner. The hazard is the hazard.
What that means in practical terms for an SME:
- Your insurance is being repriced using this type of data. Premiums and coverage decisions for commercial property, business interruption, and equipment are increasingly driven by forward-looking climate models. Understanding what those models indicate about your specific location gives you a basis to push back on a renewal or shop the market.
- Your bank will ask. OSFI’s Guideline B-15 now requires federally regulated lenders to assess and report climate exposure across their portfolios. That information flows downward. Expect commercial lending applications and renewal questionnaires to start asking about climate risk, first from the big banks, then from credit unions and BDC.
- Your supply chain has hazards you have never priced. Riskthinking.AI tracks more than 50 distinct physical climate hazards at up to 10-metre resolution — not just flood, but also wildfire, ice storm, extreme heat,drought, freeze-thaw cycles, and more. If a single Ontario warehouse is your supplier’s sole point of failure, knowing what that address looks like in 2035 is a real business question.
- Your real estate decisions have a 30-year tail. Whether you are signing a 10-year lease, buying a building, or expanding into a second city, you are making a bet on what that location looks like decades from now. The data to inform that the bet exists.
What Riskthinking.AI offers
The company’s products are organized in three tiers, each suited to a different kind of user.
VELO Enterprise
Used by banks, insurers, and the largest corporations. VELO lets an organization upload its own asset data for every property, plant, pipeline, or branch, and run climate scenarios against it. This is the platform OSFI selected. It is also what large Canadian corporates use to file climate disclosures and integrate physical-risk data into enterprise risk management. For most SMEs, this is overkill.
Web Applications
Faster, lower-cost web tools aimed at specific use cases, disclosure reporting, equity research, and due diligence on a single property or portfolio. These are designed for businesses that need an answer to a focused question without buying an enterprise platform.
MyClimate.ai
A forward-looking climate-risk service for Canadian homeowners. Type in an address and see how the property is exposed to physical hazards over the coming decades. For an SME, this matters in two ways.First, your home or commercial property is an address you should run. Second, for any service business with customers in homes, contractors, brokers, real-estate professionals, and restoration companies,understanding what your customers are about to learn about their own properties is a competitive advantage.
What “already running” means
Software that claims to predict climate risk is everywhere. Software that has been deployed inside regulators, banks, and the Bloomberg Terminal for years is rare. Riskthinking.AI’s track record speaks for itself.
- Three years of continuous operation through the Bloomberg Terminal, with roughly two billion data points exchanged each month.
- National flood data delivered to OSFI on 11 Canadian cities through the VELO platform.
- Integration into the enterprise risk system of a major bank.
- Supply-chain climate-risk work on food security, now under discussion with four federal ministries.
Canada is in a moment where it has decided to back its own AI champions. Riskthinking.AI belongs in a field that matters to every bank, insurer, and infrastructure operator on Earth.
These are not pilots. They are live functions that the platform has been doing flawlessly for years.
The bigger Canadian story
For Canadian SMEs, the practical takeaway is simpler than that strategic story. The most sophisticated climate-risk platform your bank or insurer is using to make decisions about your business is built a blocks west of Bathurst Street in Toronto. The data is accessible. The questions you should be asking about your insurance, your supply chain, your real estate, and your customers are answerable.
Climate risk is no longer a topic for the sustainability report at the back of an annual filing. It has moved to the front office. Knowing that and acting on it is what separates the businesses that will thrive in the next decade from those that absorb the damage.
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Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information intended only for informational purposes. CanadianSME Small Business Magazine does not endorse or guarantee any products or services mentioned. Readers are advised to conduct their research and due diligence before making business decisions.
