Keeping Pace

National Insurance Conference of Canada
Quebec City

The recent National Insurance Conference of Canada in Quebec City once again offered timely and relevant topics for insurers and reinsurers alike. The only constant is that things are changing quickly and everyone needs to keep pace.

It is anticipated the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) will next year release a discussion paper exploring catastrophe coverage and reinsurance practices, an exploration that, hopefully, will bolster understanding, noted Neville Henderson, OSFI’s assistant superintendent of the insurance supervision sector.

“We do have concerns about growing trends in weather-related events, so we monitor those closely,” Henderson said. “Reinsurance is extremely important in managing catastrophe risk and we’ve found we don’t have a deep understanding of how some of that is done.”

Other NICC speakers included Gord Enders, president of Direct-Line Insurance, who took part in the NICC panel, Where Water Meets Underinsurance: Canadian Flood Risk — A Public Policy Imperative.

Current flood insurance offerings are mostly for low- and medium-risk zones, Enders told Canadian Underwriter earlier.

“As flood mapping is more relevant and more consistent, then I think we’ll start to see some of those zones being changed and higher limits being available for offer in certain zones,” he said before the conference.

“We need to start fine-tuning those coverages,” Enders said. “In fact, some companies have to step up to the plate and start providing those coverages.”

NICC also featured a Global Leaders Panel.

Cyber is “one of the big future insurance pools,” said Maurice Tulloch, chief executive officer of international insurance for Aviva.

In the United Kingdom, Tulloch reported that Aviva’s cover for small and medium-sized enterprises there as a sub-limit offering. “So, we obviously don’t cover things like reputational, which is a big emerging exposure,” he said. “We’ve got to be there. That’s what consumers need,” he added.

Read the full article in the Digital Edition of the November 2017 Canadian Underwriter.

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