The Swiss Re Institute – Research and long-term strategy is crucial to the company
The Swiss Re Institute strengthens the company’s reputation as a thought leader, housing our insurance, economic and risk research.
Thought leadership
Swiss Re is a thought leader in the insurance industry and is dedicated to making the world more resilient. The company’s focus on research is core to its business and essential for its clients. The Swiss Re Institute, launched in March 2017, is at the centre of this identity.
As Swiss Re’s Group CEO Christian Mumenthaler put it when the company announced the creation of the Institute in December 2016, research and development, and the building of a strong, macro knowledge base focused on longer-term trends within the company are critical to Swiss Re’s business. Knowledge also equips the company with a competitive advantage. The Swiss Re Institute engages with Swiss Re’s stakeholders by sharing insights and publishing a wide range of research from both internal and external partners. The Institute, which is home to the Centre for Global Dialogue, also runs panels and symposia featuring relevant and prominent external and internal speakers to engage in discussion and address key questions critical to closing the insurance protection gap and staying abreast of new trends in insurance markets.
Jeffrey Bohn
Director of the Swiss Re Institute
The Swiss Re Institute builds on established strengths of Swiss Re, such as our long-running flagship sigma publication, our executive training programmes, our risk research, and our well-known conference series with new complementary products.
The Swiss Re Institute will create new opportunities to collect and curate novel data, including unstructured data such as text documents.
The Swiss Re Institute will also provide a path to longer-term experimentation and cultivation of new technology tools in the data-analytics and machine-intelligence arenas.
All this we will do through coordination with linked research lines within Swiss Re and with our extensive external academic and stakeholder network.
Research & Innovation
This is the Swiss Re Institute, in its own language – figures and statistics:
54
Publications
In 2017, the Swiss Re Institute published 54 expertise, sigma, and risk research publications, on topics such as InsurTech and critical illness in India.
+200
Presentations
The Swiss Re Institute gave more than 200 external and client presentations throughout the many different regions in which Swiss Re operates, including at Monte Carlo and at the Korea Business Leaders Forum.
41
Events
The Swiss Re Institute held 41 Zurich-based and regional events in 2017, including the Swiss Re Inaugural Symposia and the CRO Assembly.
80
Insight
In 2017, the Swiss Re Institute collected data from 61 insurance markets and 19 leading insurance companies.
18
Client executive programmes
In 2017, the Swiss Re Institute organised 18 client executive programmes with our client marketing teams around the world, including in Zurich and Guangdong.
Swiss Re Institute’s research
The Institute’s research, which includes Swiss Re’s sigma publications, covers important and current topics ranging from emerging risk pools to risk preferences in high-growth markets, and allows the company to focus on bigger questions and take a longer, strategic view. Swiss Re Institute’s researchers currently focus on following and engaging with crucial sector themes like digital transformation – for example, how will InsurTech influence traditional companies and, in particular, our clients? How can insurers best seize the opportunity and collaborate with the new tech players, rather than letting them disrupt their business? How will artificial intelligence affect society at large and, in particular, the financial sector?
The Institute also tackles ongoing trends in the company’s core business lines, in both life and health and property and casualty. This includes topics such as the ongoing growth of diabetes in China, the rising risk of natural catastrophes in regions currently garnering less focus, as well as the future of food safety as demand for imports from emerging economies grow and the food chain becomes increasingly global.
