Strategic Issues in Insurance


Book Description

This book contains a number of essays dealing with the challenges that the insurance industry faces today and tomorrow. Among others: general and specific business strategies, internet, e-commerce and distribution; the changing regulatory environment for conducting insurance business; ethical behaviour, corporate culture and the new work environment; insurance in established and emerging markets; risk management and controlling; financial markets and reinsurance challenges. It discusses not only current topics but also addresses open questions where the insurance industry still has to find some of the answers.




Securitized Insurance Risk


Book Description

Securitized Insurance Risk is one of the first books to focus exclusively on the convergence of the insurance and financial markets in risk management and the emergence of insurance risk as a non-correlated asset class. Written for insurers and investors alike, this book explores the opportunities available to forward-looking risk and investment managers. Chapters by prominent experts specifically address: the win-win principle behind securitizing insurance risk; current structures, including catastrophe bonds, structured notes, catastrophe options, and swaps; partnering financial market tools with traditional reinsurance programs; holding insurance risk, uncorrelated with stocks and bonds; pricing insurance risk instruments and evaluating basic risk; and regulatory and accounting concerns.










Issue Management in (Re)Insurance


Book Description

Today, the insurance and reinsurance industries find themselves exposed to an unprecedented degree of scrutiny from core stakeholders: policyholders, employees, investors and supervisory authorities. This increased interest is a reaction to the fundamental changes that have recently been taking place in the industry's operating environment. In response to this trend towards growing stakeholder awareness, (re)insurers are turning their attention to the concept of issue management, a system designed to help top management both avert risks and capture business opportunities, and which has a long and proven record in other industries. This article outlines this intriguing concept, and examines its mounting relevance as a mechanism for dealing with the shifting external parameters within which the industry operates. It draws heavily on Swiss Re's experience of implementing a formalized issue management process over a three-year period.










Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick


Book Description

Beat the odds with a bold strategy from McKinsey & Company "Every once in a while, a genuinely fresh approach to business strategy appears" —legendary business professor Richard Rumelt, UCLA McKinsey & Company's newest, most definitive, and most irreverent book on strategy—which thousands of executives are already using—is a must-read for all C-suite executives looking to create winning corporate strategies. Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick is spearheading an empirical revolution in the field of strategy. Based on an extensive analysis of the key factors that drove the long-term performance of thousands of global companies, the book offers a ground-breaking formula that enables you to objectively assess your strategy's real odds of future success. "This book is fundamental. The principles laid out here, with compelling data, are a great way around the social pitfalls in strategy development." —Frans Van Houten, CEO, Royal Philips N.V. The authors have discovered that over a 10-year period, just 1 in 12 companies manage to jump from the middle tier of corporate performance—where 60% of companies reside, making very little economic profit—to the top quintile where 90% of global economic profit is made. This movement does not happen by magic—it depends on your company's current position, the trends it faces, and the big moves you make to give it the strongest chance of vaulting over the competition. This is not another strategy framework. Rather, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick shows, through empirical analysis and the experiences of dozens of companies that have successfully made multiple big moves, that to dramatically improve performance, you have to overcome incrementalism and corporate inertia. "A different kind of book—I couldn't put it down. Inspiring new insights on the facts of what it takes to move a company's performance, combined with practical advice on how to deal with real-life dynamics in management teams." —Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup Latin America




Policy Issues in Insurance Risk Awareness, Capital Markets and Catastrophic Risks


Book Description

Includes reports on initiatives to promote natural hazard awareness and disaster risk reduction education, the role of financial markets in financial mitigation of large-scale risks, mechanisms used to quantify catastrophe losses, and hazard risk mapping efforts in Southeast Asian countries.