‘Polycrisis’ confronts insurers, claims Swiss Re executive

Insurers’ clients are facing a “polycrisis” – a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part. It is a term first coined by the World Economic Forum last year. But it is an accurate description of the challenges clients face, says Adrian Hall, head of UK, Ireland, South Africa and EMEA Wholesale, at Swiss Re Corporate Solutions.

Hall was speaking to this publication during Airmic’s annual conference, called Tomorrow’s Risks Today, which is being held in Edinburgh this week (June 3-5).

The World Economic Forum notes at the start of 2023 that the “cascading and connected crises we find ourselves in” demand “a new descriptor to define the scale of the problems the world is facing”. It said that the collective vocabularies stored in the world’s dictionaries didn’t appear to hold a single world to sum up all this strife. So it invented a new one: Polycrisis.

Hall said the term accurately reflects the complex, multifaceted and nuanced challenges facing clients. From rising levels of nat cat losses to supply chain challenges to geopolitical uncertainty, he has never seen so many challenges at play.

But he also believes insurers have the tools to help. For Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, he highlighted three areas of strategy designed to help clients manage this uncertainty.

The first is its strategy around helping clients better manage risks by using alternative risk transfer (ART). It has developed a comprehensive offering around parametric solutions, which can offer clients certainty and fast payments. Another part of its ART offering is helping clients form and use captives to manage their risks. These can also take the form of virtual captives, whereby the client gets all the benefits of a normal captive. Swiss Re Corporate Solutions handles the set up and administration of the supporting balance sheet.

The second area is through its new Risk Data & Services (RDS) platform, which helps companies build a digital twin of their assets to get an accurate overview of their exposure. With this virtual representation of their business, clients can create simulations based on real-world scenarios and access risk insights. This more granular understanding of risks enables corporate clients to take better control of their risk management. 

Finally, Hall flags its PULSE portal, which allows a client and their broker, to monitor and manage their international insurance programme from one secure place. It combines several aspects of any insurance programme onto one customer portal and gives access to real-time information. Clients can review their policy, track premium payments, submit loss notifications, monitor claims, and track progress of a risk improvement.

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