There are several things that keep SCOR’s Jean-Paul Conoscente awake at night. Climate change is one of them; cyber risk is another. Only time will tell whether these risks are actually insurable, cautions Conoscente, who became the CEO of SCOR Global P&C in February 2019.
Executive Summary
The challenges facing the global reinsurance business include increasing protectionism, trade wars and cession demands by localities. Then there are the risks of climate change and cyber and the uncertainty over how to cover and price for them. These and other industry challenges keep SCOR's Jean-Paul Conoscente awake at night and upset reinsurers' desire for control. But the executive thinks that while the industry and his own company may not have all the answers, they are taking the right approach for the long term.Then there is a less talked-about challenge facing the industry: Conoscente sees the world increasingly breaking apart and separating.
“It’s fragmented from a regulatory point of view, where more and more countries are taking protectionist policies, both from a trading, economic point of view as well as from an insurance point of view,” he noted.
“Many more countries than in the past are requiring mandatory cessions to local reinsurers before going to outside markets and forcing reinsurers who want to do business in that country to put capital there,” Conoscente said. “It goes against the diversification model of reinsurers to write risk globally to be able to better face individual risks that occur.”
