Insurance industry in ‘fight for relevance’, says Ferma panel

Keeping staff happy now essential business strategy

The insurance industry is fighting to remain relevant amid a risk revolution, said experts during a key panel debate at the Ferma Forum in Madrid.

During a 40-minute panel session, insurance industry leaders were invited to make five minutes pitches to an audience of risk professionals about their views on the future of the sector and how to tackle the challenges ahead.

Some did not mince their words when warning about the need to evolve in order to better serve their clients. “The insurance industry is in a fight for relevance,” said Julie Page, CEO for Aon in EMEA.

She said the world has recently gone through a risk revolution and turmoil is now normality.

“Supply chains are disrupted, so much is happening in the world of trade and around macroeconomics,” she said. “We have inflation. We now have slow growth. Generative AI is coming into all of our business models, and behind us come dark forces and threat actions that are just as sophisticated.”

She continued: “Weather is changing dramatically across the north and eastern parts of Europe. We are seeing severe flooding in the southern parts of Europe, we are seeing rising heat changing agriculture, and it is likely to change health systems across Europe as well. Workforces are changing too… Retaining, attracting and supporting talent is another challenge that we face.”

Page said research by Aon shows that 75% of business leaders don’t think their companies are keeping up with the pace of change.

“Neither is the insurance industry, the risk industry,” she said. “We are facing a revolution of risk and we have to respond.”

Anne-Marie Jarvis, head of commercial insurance in Spain at Zurich, argued that insurers need to develop data application tools that can overcome ongoing difficulties in sharing data.

“As risk managers, how would you feel that with the data we are now being able to analyse, we could provide you with a solution or access to that information via a platform?” she asked. “That is the first thing: we need to be able to get that information out. We need to put it in a format that you [risk managers] can access.”

Fred Kleiterp, European general manager at Beazley, said that data analysis is only as good as the people in charge of crunching the numbers and applying them for actual risk management uses.

“The pretty magic really happens when people deploy their expertise across different disciplines, collaborate together to source the real client problems, and with that enable progress,” he said.

The insurance industry leaders also focused on the need to develop the risk management function. “We need to evolve risk management from a dedicated technical function into risk leadership to run our business successfully,” argued Nina Arquint, CEO for EMEA at Swiss Re Corporate Solutions.

She added that companies need risk professionals that can convince other colleagues to follow their lead.

This all raises another key question for the insurance industry. And one that risk managers face too: how to maintain talent.

Valenti Barbat Beatriz, director of insurance at QBE Europe and interim general manager in Spain, urged companies to pay attention to how happy their employers are at work in order to retain a scarce but invaluable resource.

“Today, working in a happy company is not only a nice thing to have,” she said. “Being happy at work is a business strategy that leads to success.”

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