Swiss Re Corporate Solutions China Property Workshop

Swiss Re Corporate Solutions Insurance China Limited organized a workshop focused on Natural Catastrophe (Nat Cat) Risk Solutions on 19^th May 2016 in The Four Seasons Hotel Shanghai. Swiss Re Corporate Solutions Insurance China Limited is a fully integrated into Swiss Re Corporate Solutions focused on providing commercial insurance to corporate clients in China.

Lively and productive discussions at the workshop provided details about the natural catastrophe landscape and its impact on the country's economy. The discussions gained highly positive feedback from the audience, which included all major insurance brokers in Shanghai. Marc Giger, Swiss Re Corporate Solutions' APAC Nat Cat Expert recounted recent events, their economic and social impact and shared with the audience the evolution of the insurance industry's capabilities to model and analyze natural perils such as floods, earthquakes and typhoons.

The state of the art modeling capabilities that Swiss Re Corporate Solutions utilizes provide underwriters and experts with the ability to offer non-traditional natural catastrophe covers that are uniquely designed for each client and can cover assets across a city, country or even globally.

Stanley Cochrane, Head Property for Asia Pacific, further elaborated on Swiss Re Corporate Solutions' ability to provide comprehensive tailor-made multi-year insurance solutions for large corporates or captives. "Insuring uninsurable assets or losses typically excluded or heavily sub limited from the scope of traditional insurance cover against Nat Cat perils is the key value proposition for these types of products," said Stanley concluding his presentation.

Natural catastrophes are a major cause of disruption and loss for all businesses, especially agriculture, construction and infrastructure and manufacturing in China. The costs of these events can be significant, however, insurance coverage through non-standard solutions, such as weather index based solutions and also Delay in Start-Up (DSU) and Business Interruption insurance can help organizations to build resilience against these exposures. "As a pioneer and market leader in innovative insurance solutions, Swiss Re Corporate Solutions is able to offer a full range of products, such as parametric and index-based solutions, to address Force Majeure events," says Hadi Riachi, Head Property & Specialties at SRCS China ltd.

During the workshop we shared with attendees the latest edition of Swiss Re's flagship sigma series. The first edition of 2016 provided a review of natural catastrophes and man-made disasters in 2015, which totaled 353 disasters amounting to 92 billion dollars in economic losses. Globally, we incurred 198 natural disasters last year, the highest number on sigma records.

The sigma which also includes a special chapter on the explosions at the Port of Tianjin can be downloaded at http://www.swissre.com/sigma/. The severity of the blasts and large asset exposures at the time mean that Tianjin is one of the biggest man-made insurance loss events worldwide ever.