Bloomberg Professional Services
The Asia-Pacific risk landscape is undergoing a rapid transformation, leading insurers to adapt to the new hazards that can impact life and capital and encouraging them to explore the uses of powerful new technologies to improve their business outcomes.
Factors both local and global are influencing the region’s insurance industry, chief among them the pricing and policy-writing challenges posed by climate change and the business and operational opportunities offered by artificial intelligence (AI).
This changing scene is backlit by a relatively healthy and optimistic trading environment, especially in Hong Kong and Japan.
Annualized premium income among the Chinese city’s firms doubled in the past year, according to Bloomberg Intelligence data, which also suggests that this year is likely to see a 25% expansion, with banks forecast to lead the charge, especially amid rising demand for legacy planning and wealth transfers.
The Hong Kong industry’s transition into the ultra-high-net worth market from the middle-to-high income bracket it has traditionally served was highlighted in the record $250 million life that policy HSBC Insurance Hong Kong wrote for an unnamed client in February.
Insurers and their underwriters are also encouraged by signals from Chinese authorities that they will support the local economy and even introduce new stimulus measures.
That’s great news for Hong Kong insurers, who plan to focus their investments on Chinese, according to the Bloomberg Insurance Forum 2024, which was held in Hong Kong recently. And while the local market is dealing with the uncertainty of an anti-corruption probe in a narrow part of the industry, the outcome is likely to strengthen guardrails that protect consumers, eventually boosting confidence in the city’s insurers.
The Japanese market is also performing well, especially on the investment side, aided by rising bond yields, yen weakness and a robust stock market. Returns to insurers are expected in the 6%-7% range.
Regulatory help
The strong position of the regional industry will be beneficial as it tackles the new risk outlook, particularly regarding those emanating from climate change.
The Asia Pacific financial sector is thought to have responded slower than other parts of the global economy to emerging threats such as severe weather events, flooding and biodiversity loss. Regulators are responding, however, and with the benefit of learning from their overseas counterparts’ earlier mistakes, they can be a partner in helping the local insurance industry adapt.
Regulators can be of assistance in advising companies on measures such as benchmarking sustainability-linked executive pay. This concept is popular around the world as a means of encouraging corporate leaders to pay more attention to their companies’ impacts on the environment and society. In the Asia Pacific region, however, the slower integration of sustainability practices has meant that the focus has remained largely on rewarding executives for financial performance. A survey by consultancy WTW this year found that in Singapore – where strong regulatory ESG policies are enforced – 93% of companies incorporate sustainability in their incentive plans. In Hong Kong, however, the figure is 55% and in China 29%.
This is a difficult ask for insurers. The industry itself produces few direct greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, and its core competency lies in protecting customers from the impacts of risks, rather than eliminating them. Further, such compensation strategies need targets, but in a risk domain where trusted and complete data is only just becoming available, goals are difficult to set.
Regulators could also provide a vital role in shaping the way the insurance industry covers natural catastrophes. Currently less than half of all such global losses are covered, and with claims last year exceeding a 23-year record there is likely to be greater call for protection of life and capital from increasingly adverse events.
Industry overseers, again, could set pricing benchmarks and encourage better surveillance to provide earlier warnings of impending catastrophes. The usefulness of this was proven when the devastating Typhoon Mangkhut ripped through the Asia Pacific in 2018. Economic losses in Hong Kong from that storm were smaller than from a black rain event last year because people and companies had been warned earlier, giving them more time to put mitigating measure in place.
Better data
Knowing how to price cover for climate-related risks is also proving tricky. Some incidents, such as flash floods, can be very localized and affect just a single street. Policies are usually calculated using data and traditional judgement. But the data for climate events is generally broad and not localized enough to be of much use for writing individual policies.
The data challenge would be improved with better disclosures from companies. And it is here, again, that regulators can help. They can ensure that the right information is reported and provide disclosure advice to smaller companies who are less likely to have the capacity to properly gather the necessary information.
To better cope with these challenges, insurers need at least to bake sustainability considerations into their everyday thinking, experts said at the forum. Climate considerations must be as much a part of insurers’ business-as-usual practices as they have become for their customers’ day-to-day operations.
New tools
One of the most likely means of improving the industry’s overall preparedness for the new risk environment is AI.
The technology is expected to provide insurers with the means to make more accurate predictions so that they can better tailor policies to customer needs. AI is also likely to provide operational efficiencies through automation, which can improve customer engagements, streamline back-office activities and make regulatory reporting more accurate.
AI is not without its own risks; many models are new and untested, the compute power needed to process models will exert its own carbon footprint and implementation of new systems can be costly.
But its transformational potential is huge. For instance, it gives greater firepower to scenario tools such as computable general equilibrium models – large numerical models that combine economic theory with real economic data to work out the potential impacts of policies or shocks on the economy. Such models can be extremely useful for insurers, who make calculations based on future assumptions all the time.
Bloomberg solutions
Bloomberg also recognizes the power of AI models to insurers and has made some available on the Terminal.
One, which is built on Nowcasting technology, digests high-frequency economic data to provide real-time, continually updated signals on upcoming economic events, such as non-farm payroll announcements. Another model assigns a sentiment value to Bloomberg headlines about Federal Reserve activities to give an indication of likely decisions during rates policy meetings.
The AI models complement a suite of powerful digital tools that Bloomberg offers insurers and the broader financial community that cover risk management, portfolio optimisation and regulatory compliance, among other workflows that are key to insurers.
Its asset and portfolio management tools AIM and PORT help insurers take control of their investment strategies and is supported by the MARS risk assessment and analysis technology.
Additionally, the ESG suite provides datasets, analytics and news on a wide range of sustainability processes, supported by the BNEF feed, which provides visibility across the full spectrum of new energy providers and markets.
At a time of great change in the Asia Pacific insurance market, Bloomberg has the technology and data to help insurers and reinsurers better assess risks both new and old, and manage their portfolios to provide the best outcomes for their customers and investors.