Joint RCE-OECD virtual workshop on “Enhancing the role of Insurance in providing Financial Protection”, 15 October 2021
Joint RCE-OECD virtual workshop on “Enhancing the role of Insurance in providing Financial Protection”, 15 October 2021
Ms Flore-Anne Messy, Acting Deputy Director, Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs, OECD highlighted in her introductory speech that “We value our partnership with the FSC and the Regional Centre, which has allowed us to learn from each other and share good practices and experiences across the region and beyond”.
Mr Dhanesswurnath Thakoor, Chief Executive of the FSC stated in his opening remarks that “This workshop comes at an opportune moment to rethink about the insurance of the future. We have come up with a plethora of measures, not only to address some of the challenges faced by our domestic insurance industry, but also going forward, brought some innovative products to complement the existing product range”.
The workshop was divided into two sessions:
Session 1: Establishing and adapting a regulatory and supervisory framework for insurance
It examined the institutional arrangements for insurance regulation and supervision, and how regulatory and supervisory approaches can be adapted to leverage the opportunities presented by emerging technologies and developments in international reinsurance markets.
One of the speakers, Dr. Marcelo Ramella, Director of the Financial Stability Department, Bermuda Monetary Authority, elaborated on the key elements in regulating and supervising reinsurance, with a focus on the cross-border nature of the reinsurance business. He emphasised the challenges and opportunities posed by recent developments in the risk and risk transfer landscape.
Session 2: Leveraging the role of insurance for managing catastrophe risks
It explored some of the challenges and potential solutions of insurance in protecting against catastrophe risks such as extreme weather conditions, large-scale cyber-attacks and infectious disease outbreaks and how to reinforce business strategies.
During the session, Dr. Paula Jarzabkowski who was one of the speakers and is a Professor of Strategic Management at Cass Business School, City University London, highlighted the rise of multi-sovereign risk pools that provide disaster liquidity insurance for rapid response to catastrophe. She explained how such pools are characterised by paradoxes between financial and development goals, individual country, whole pool of interests, and short and long-term approaches to disaster. She further described how these paradoxes create tensions and working through them lead to innovations that strengthen both the pools and the countries’ abilities to use them for disaster risk planning and response.
Overall, the workshop was focused on how government, insurance regulators and supervisors could create an enabling environment for insurance to contribute to economic and social resilience.
Further to the workshop, the following feedback was favourably received:
Mr Bhimsen Ummur, Senior Investigator at the Assets Recovery Investigation Division (ARID) under the aegis of the Financial Intelligence Unit stated:
"I would like to express my gratitude to the FSC Team for having successfully organised such workshop which I am sure will be very useful for ARID personnel in our investigation."