Funding longer lives

People are living longer today than ever before, but the share of the working population is shrinking. As a result of this demographic megatrend, the costs of funding retirement income, healthcare and long-term care in old age are increasing dramatically. This could have significant financial consequences for individuals, insurers, employer pension funds and society in general. Public-private partnerships are needed to overcome this challenge.

Life and health reinsurance is part of our core business, and we are the world’s largest reinsurer of mortality risk. Consequently, we are a natural home for the longevity and health risks associated with ageing societies, and have the financial strength to take on risks across a person’s whole lifespan. Swiss Re has a broad base of expertise to help insurers understand the medical and social factors that affect longevity, mortality and morbidity, and we can bring new insights from experience in markets around the world. We want to help clients create solutions that better support people as they age.

Our notable achievements in 2015:

• We continued to host the Asia Health Symposia series, which is an information-sharing platform to gather a cross-section of key stakeholders and create a forum for sharing information and encouraging discussion, collaboration and exchange;
• We published the 2015 European Insurance Report – a study of more than 13 000 people in 13 European countries which, for the first time, measured a EUR 750 billion disability income gap. This gap is considered to be the amount of protection missing between the annual income required by people in the event they are injured or have poor health and the amount available through private, employer and/or state provisions;
• We contributed several industry presentations and participated in panel discussions on various topics related to healthy ageing and the urgent need for innovative solutions in this space.