Leading market players fully committed to fast-growing Swiss Romandie region
The good news for local buyers is insurers and brokers attending the recent Sirm 2024 Geneva Rendez-Vous clearly remain committed to the fast-growing French speaking Romandie region of Switzerland, which looks set to remain, or in some cases become, a key focus.
To give local risk and insurance managers food for thought, we asked the Sirm partners at the event about their strategy for the Switzerland and the Romandie region in particular. Below are their responses.
Insurers
Moreno Bühler, country manager for Switzerland at AXA XL Insurance
Almost imperceptibly, French-speaking Switzerland has developed into a major economic engine in recent years. Since the turn of the millennium, the gross domestic product (GDP) of the Romandie region has risen by 49%. Western Switzerland is thus growing faster than most other regions in Switzerland and Western Europe, even beating the US.
We have been focusing on and operating in the Romandie region since the beginning of AXA XL, and we remain fully committed to continuing to invest in local talent and our local footprint to further strengthen our local collaboration with brokers and customers in the region. For us, proximity to our customers and distribution partners is key to providing the right solutions for our local customers’ risks, even the most complex ones.
We’re convinced that – thanks to our local presence – our business partners in the Romandie can directly benefit from this specific expertise and understanding of local language and market specifics.
Rudolf Scheller, general representative and vice-president at FM Global Insurance Europe, Switzerland
We have identified Switzerland, including Romandie, as a key strategic market for FM Global products, targeting large commercial and midsize companies with a focus on risk management and resilience. We will broaden our offerings with the launch of AFM, focusing on soft occupancies and the middle market. Additionally, we will introduce new products for the renewable energy sector.
Massimo Luperto, customer and distribution manager for the Romandie region at HDI Global Switzerland
Our plan and strategy for the Swiss market, particularly the Romandie region, focuses on leveraging the region’s diversity and competitiveness. We aim to enhance our visibility and knowledge about our company by showcasing our expertise and capabilities. We want the region to know who we are and what we are capable of doing.
We recognise the importance of the Romandie market as it houses a significant number of multinational corporations. As a partner in transformation, HDI Global continually strives to provide tailored and comprehensive insurance solutions to meet the specific needs of our clients.
Dorian Buono, director Romandie of Commercial Risk Solutions at Aon Switzerland
Aon Switzerland’s main differentiator remains our capacity to support large, international, and complex companies in their risk-transfer strategies. This is in our DNA, the segment where we have the biggest market share and where the added value is increasing the most, considering the growing complexity of our environment. We are convinced that having in-house the full scope of services and tools articulated by the best experts in Switzerland is a critical asset that we can deliver for the benefit of our clients. We are constantly adapting our methodology to ensure the cycle of identification/quantification of risks, advice on transfer strategy, intermediation by leveraging the global markets, implementation of coverages, and claims management remains up to date.
Recently, we have strengthened our cyber consulting team by hiring new colleagues from the industry to address increasingly technical requests. Our capabilities have also grown within the digital assets and intellectual property fields, where we have invested in new colleagues capable of understanding complex client needs and bridging the gap between these high-tech industries and the insurance world.
To enhance competition, we have opened the globally available insurance market through investments in our reinsurance team and have agreed on several facilities to support filling capacity gaps at affordable prices on complex risk transfer placements.
Our strategy in Romandie is fully aligned with the Swiss one; we have no silos or Röstigraben within our company. The key criteria driving all our decisions are client satisfaction and our capacity to find the best expert to address a specific need. While the commercial teams are usually close to our clients – in terms of geography, culture and language – the specialists involved in solving issues can come from Zurich, London or even further afield.
Andy Ewen and Chris Sutton from McGill and Partners
McGill and Partners was established to focus on large and/or complex risks and to provide a differentiated alternative to the prevailing broker landscape. This makes the Swiss market, Romandie in particular, the perfect fit. Our offering is to be nimble in navigating the entire (re)insurance value chain of carriers on behalf of our clients, and by focusing on individual client needs, flexibility of engagement, new and innovative ideas and bringing clients closer to capital. We are, and will continue to be, highly motivated to add value to the Romandie and broader Swiss client base.
A broad cross section of Sirm members have captives and are exploring alternative risk transfer approaches. This is an exciting area of development as it aligns to several of our core areas of focus: to simplify the complexities of the (re)insurance value chain and create new risk financing options and alternatives that deliver sustainable long-term value to clients.
