Blog

In a world of greater unpredictability and climate impacts, insurance can be a challenging product to deploy. Forward-thinking regulators, policymakers, and supervisors are changing their tactics, ensuring insurance can be a tool for inclusion. In a recent event bringing together alumni from Women’s World Banking’s Leadership and Diversity Program for Regulators (LDR), forward-thinking government institutions shared how they are approaching inclusive insurance. The session was sponsored and co-hosted by the Centre of Excellence on Gender-Smart Solutions, an initiative under the Global Shield against Climate Risks, and Access to Insurance Initiative (A2ii).

The insurance industry and insurance regulators are increasingly recognising the importance of climate-related data in assessing and managing risks associated with climate change. In the landscape of risk management, the impact of climate change is becoming increasingly evident. The insurance industry and regulators alike are now turning their attention to a vital tool in navigating this reality—climate-related data.

Today, on International Women's Day, A2ii is launching the FeMa-Meter, a tool for collecting sex-disaggregated data across two categories: access to and use of insurance, and organisational diversity. The tool helps collect key insurance indicators and provides immediately a quick analysis. The tool is targeted at insurance supervisors and regulators, policymakers, and insurance companies.

Index insurance, also known as parametric insurance, has gained significant popularity in recent years due to its potential benefits. The use of satellite technology and predetermined trigger indexes allows for a swift response and efficient processing of pay-outs.

The shift to risk-based capital (RBC) approaches has many benefits for stakeholders in the insurance sector including consumers, industry players and supervisors. Not only does it support the development of the insurance market by providing flexibility and encouraging innovation, but it is also more efficient, allocating capital more appropriately to risk and reducing the amount of dormant capital. Additionally, RBC gives supervisors improved measures of financial soundness, insights into insurers’ risk management practises and corporate governance structures, comparability and proportionate ladders of intervention, leading to better supervision.