Team effort: Employees at Swiss Re’s Beijing office working to build resilience

In 2016 Guangdong Provincial and Heilongjiang Provincial Governments signed the largest natural disaster insurance program in China, designed and reinsured by Swiss Re. As impressive as that may sound, it does not even come close to reflecting the knowledge, talent, hard work, engagement and collaboration that went into this project to make it work.

These two natural disaster protection schemes are truly landmark transactions. Compared with traditional re/insurance, parametric insurance payouts are much faster. The insurance schemes also hedge the massive fiscal contingency liabilities for disaster relief that are well beyond the fiscal budget capacity of municipalities like Shanwei. The concept of using insurance to hedge fiscal contingency liabilities for disaster relief was well beyond the understanding of the industry when it was initiated three years ago by Swiss Re’s Global Partnerships team, who specialise in working with the public sector.

Teamwork and commitment

For this initiative, Swiss Re combined significant resources in product design, modelling and underwriting from multiple specialty teams in Zurich, New York, Singapore and Beijing. The cross-functional team undertook massive research in conjunction with prominent think tanks and lobbied senior officials at both ministerial and provincial levels. They have been through a journey of stress, challenge, negotiation, excitement, hardship, misery, despair and finally achievement — and reward — well beyond the average experience of normal insurance and reinsurance professionals. The outcome is not only a successful pilot for new business models for Swiss Re in China and across the region, but also a model in developing our talent in high growth markets.