Corporate Responsibility
Our actions are guided by sustainable, long-term value creation and have a tangible link to our financial performance.
Overview
Sustainable, long-term value creation serves as a guiding principle for our actions.
Swiss Re has a long-standing commitment to being a responsible company. A key element in our understanding of what this means is the desire to contribute to sustainable, long-term value creation. Or as we express it in our values:
“Taking the long-term view, and playing our part in enabling sustainable progress — for stakeholders and society in general.”
Reflecting the long-term view of our business, we seek to identify environmental and social issues that may undermine sustainable progress, and explore effective ways to address them. To do so, we use the deep understanding of re/insurance markets and the extensive risk expertise embedded in our company. In many parts of our business (eg client-facing units, risk management, stakeholder dialogue, logistics etc.), we have specific teams and processes to identify relevant sustainability-related challenges in these areas.
In other words, we have been using a decentralised approach to determine “material” sustainability issues. We present all these issues and our efforts to address them in our annual Corporate Responsibility Reports (the 2015 edition will be published in May 2016). In this chapter of the Annual Report we use a narrower definition of materiality and focus on topics which we perceive as having a tangible link to our financial performance. Thus, our Corporate Responsibility Report addresses all our stakeholders on a wide range of topics they might take an interest in, while this chapter of the Financial Report aims to speak more specifically to our investors and other members of the financial community.
Sector leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices
Swiss Re has been named as the insurance industry sector leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices for 2015. This is the ninth time since 2004 that we have led the sector in these rankings. The award highlights our long-term commitment to sustainable business and our efforts to continuously and progressively embed sustainability into key business processes and operations.