Insuring the Intangibles

Insurers are dealing with a shifting landscape. In addition to the impact of a warmer world, structural changes driven by technologic, economic, demographic, societal, and geopolitical trends are creating new risks and challenges for the insurance industry in commercial lines.

A back-to-back series of natural catastrophes led to record insured losses in 2017. The particularly active hurricane season, represented by Category 4+ hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria (HIM), coupled with wildfires, thunderstorms and heavy rainfalls, resulted in total insured losses of $144 billion (all figures U.S.). Additionally, these events caused total economic losses of $337 billion, leaving a global catastrophe protection gap of $193 billion and thousands of people in need.

The world economy is going through significant structural changes. Over a period of a few decades, the competitiveness of companies has increasingly come to rely on intangible assets instead of physical ones, in addition to the ability of a business to operate efficiently across borders.

This changing paradigm is creating new risks – for example, cyber, supply chain disruption – and shifting and expanding the demand for insurance from asset/balance sheet covers to earnings/cash flow protection. This transformation of the insurance industry triggers the need for new products and innovation around data analytics to provide clients with more holistic, global and end-to-end insurance solutions.

The developed and sophisticated Canadian commercial insurance market is directly impacted by these disruptive forces, which will put pressure on growth and profitability.

Read the full article in the Digital Edition of the June 2018 Canadian Underwriter.

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Adrian Hall, CEO; Corrinne Pollard, Head of Claims; and Sarah Kestle Head of Sales, Swiss Re Corporate Solutions Canada; and Xavier Tinguely, Senior Corporate Development Manager, Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, USA