Insurer Priorities Differ Around The Globe

Insurer Priorities Differ Around The Globe

Asia Correspondent

Singapore

The biggest concern of the insurance industry today is maintaining competitive pricing with adequate profitability, according to a survey of attendees here at the annual seminar of the International Insurance Society.

The second most pressing worry for attendees in general was the ability to meet customer demands, although insurers in the United States and Canada differed in that they regard managing risk as their second biggest challenge.

The IIS survey revealed how insurers today have vastly different worries than they did over the past two years, when the most important concerns were “meeting customer demand” in 2001 and the “influence of technology and e-commerce” in 2000.

A total of 73 firms participated in the survey, with 17 coming from the United States and Canada, 31 from Asia, 14 from Europe, and 11 from a fourth region described as “other,” comprised of respondents from Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia, the Middle East and Africa.

“There is a lot of worry about what is happening in the equity markets. The insurance industry has been severely battered, both because it is a major investor and also because it is the provider of liability products,” explained IIS Chairman Douglas Leatherdale after announcing the results of the survey. Mr. Leatherdale is the retired chairman and CEO of the Minnesota-based St. Paul Companies.

“This is an industry that moves along business cycles and pendulum swings. The recent events have broken this system of cycles,” said Andrew F. Giffin, principal of the New York-based Tillinghast-Towers Perrin.

He struck a positive note by saying that “substantial new capital is coming into the industry. There is no problem about adequate capitalization.”

The concerns differ from region to region. The greatest worry in the United States, Canada and Asia is maintaining competitive pricing with adequate profitability, while this comes up as the second most pressing concern among European insurers. European firms ranked “managing risk” as the primary concern, something that came up as the second biggest worry in Asia, the United States and Canada.

The three regions differed when it came to choosing their third major concern, which was “merging or acquiring for needed growth” in the United States and Canada, “meeting customer demand” in Europe, and “keeping and building talent” in Asia.

Attendees from the fourth region described as “other” listed their biggest concern as meeting customer demand, followed by “maintaining competitive pricing with adequate profitability.” The third major concern for attendees from this region was regulatory oversight, something that did not come up as a matter of concern in the other regions.

“The focus has clearly shifted from e-commerce to pricing. Branding is a new topic that many companies are talking about. European insurers seem to be making a greater impact on branding as compared to the American ones,” said IIS President and Chief Executive Officer Patrick Kenny, echoing the concerns of insurance companies that had participated in the survey.

“I guess the board of directors will put managements under much greater pressure to ensure they maintain very high standards of accountability,” Mr. Leatherdale said.

The IIS officials were asked if it was time for regulators to step in and make sure that the insurance industry did not suffer with regard to the growing concern over accounting standards followed by the industry in general.

“What the regulator can do is very limited. They can take care of extreme cases. But for the most part, the industry will have to look after corporate governance and maintain high standards of accountability on its own,” Mr. Giffin said.

“You have to have a partnership with the regulator. There is a difference in the way auditors do things in the U.S. and in United Kingdom. I guess we need to carefully look at how things are done elsewhere,” Mr. Kenny said.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, July 29, 2002. Copyright 2002 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.