News

In November and December 2023, the Insurance Development Forum (IDF) and the Access to Insurance Initiative (A2ii) co-convened a workshop series dedicated to insurance supervisors from emerging markets and developing economies. This collaboration between the public and private sectors represents a strong and timely response in the agenda set out by the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) in their report ‘A call to action: the role of insurance supervisors in addressing natural catastrophe protection gaps’, published on 2 November 2023.

The series was organised as a follow-up from the A2ii-IDF-MIN-IAIS 18th Consultative Forum that took place on 23 October 2023 in Ghana. Among other topics, participants received an overview of how the quantity of data has increased exponentially, and analytical capabilities and timely access to relevant data has improved. This has led to more innovative risk financing and risk mitigation programmes.  

The first workshop on 29 November 2023 outlined the value of understanding climate and disaster risk for supervisors, before introducing the use of catastrophe risk models for supervisory purposes. Around 100 supervisors attended this event.

Welcoming remarks were delivered by Ekhosuehi Iyahen, Secretary General of the Insurance Development Forum and Janina Voss, Interim Head of the A2ii Secretariat. Miroslav Petkov, Senior Policy Advisor at the IAIS and Bill Marcoux, Co-Chair of the IDF Law, Regulation and Resilience Policies Working Group presented on the value of understanding climate and disaster risk in market development, ensuring market stability and consumer protection, and in addressing the protection gap. This was reinforced by Tomás Soley, from the Superintendencia General de Seguros de Costa Rica (SUGESE), who described activities taking place in Costa Rica to integrate climate risk analytics into supervisory practices.

Lastly, examples of how risk analytics are used for insurance supervisory activities in developed markets were presented by Emma Watkins, Head of Exposure Management at Lloyds, and Marie Scholer, Expert on Policy Sustainable Finance, European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA). This included how Lloyd’s assess catastrophe risk from many managing agents covering global catastrophe risk, and how they validate models being used in the Lloyd’s market. 

On 7 December, the second part of this workshop presented a deeper dive into climate and disaster risk analytics, including how catastrophe models are built, how they can be used, what their limitations are and what resources are available to help supervisors regulate and use such models. 

This session was opened by Hannah Grant, Senior Advisor, Global Shield Secretariat and Co-chair of the IDF Law, Regulation and Resilience Policies Working Group, and Janina Voss, Interim Head of the A2ii Secretariat. Stuart Fraser, Technical Lead of the IDF Risk Modelling Steering Group (RMSG) then introduced risk analytic principles and approaches, including the framework of a catastrophe model, the types of data used in these analytics and how catastrophe models can be used to project future risk. 

Examples of risk modelling for supervisory purposes followed, including how the open-source Oasis Loss Modelling Framework can be used to project climate risk and run stress test scenarios (presented by Dickie Whitaker, Chief Executive, Oasis Loss Modelling Framework). Andrew Dhesi, Group Head of Property Modelling at RenaissanceRe, focussed on the details of how models can and should be validated as an ongoing process. Then Nihar Jangle, Advisor in Climate Risk Insurance at GIZ gave an example of a climate risk assessment project in which the Financial Regulatory Authority Egypt (FRA) is a core partner – demonstrating how supervisors can build capacity in this topic and act as a key agency in advising on integrating risk insights into national level risk management strategies. 

Finally, Pascale Lamb, Advisor at A2ii, and Miroslav Petkov, Senior Policy Advisor at IAIS moderated an open forum in which participants completed an interactive survey on their experience and knowledge of climate risk modelling as well as the challenges associated with taking up these analytics. This gave space for a discussion with participants on the different jurisdictions’ approaches to the topic, and identified opportunities for further capacity building, around which A2ii and IDF will now continue to collaborate on developing future knowledge sharing and capacity building  activities.

Presentations are available to download at the event page.

In case you missed the opportunity to participate in the workshop, please send us an email at secretariat@a2ii.org to receive a link to watch the recording of the sessions. Please note that the video is only available to insurance supervisors.