This week I attended the annual Monte Carlo Reinsurance Rendezvous where I was interviewed by several insurance media titles, including Insurance Day, Intelligent Insurer (which published the official Monte Carlo Today newsletter), The Insurer, new online title emerg-in, and the Insurance Journal.
This isn’t a question that I have heard asked around the insurance market, but in a time when many carriers are looking to do things a little differently, it is the perfect question to ask if you don’t want to reinvent the wheel or relearn mistakes learned by others several times in the past. There are two traits that I think that most live underwriting firms would recognize in their run-off company colleagues. The first is their ability to manage costs and their second is their claims management ability.
The insurance industry will lose thousands of jobs - one in every five - to robots and automation, according to a new KPMG report. More than half of the insurance decision makers surveyed predicted that 20% of jobs would be lost to automation and robots in next five years.
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) is an increasingly hot topic and one that is very much part of the public zeitgeist with many cities around the world hosting Extinction Rebellion protests. Some parts of the financial services sector have taken some cues and have products that are specifically tailored to address corporate and public concerns, which is something I write about in this new blog.
The birth of insurance has its roots in so-called bottomry contracts, which were known to merchants of Babylon as early as 4000–3000 BCE. Bottomry was also practised by the Hindus in 600 BCE and was well understood in ancient Greece as early as the 4th century BCE. Thousands of years later I want to pose the question are we about to experience the death of insurance as we know it?
The need for project managers has never been greater. As projects get larger and more complex it is imperative that projects and programmes are overseen by appropriately qualified and experienced people. Today there are different types of role that are essentially types of project manager. My blog here applies to all of them so no matter if your title is project manager or scrum master, or if you are using agile, waterfall, lean, six sigma, Kanban or one of the myriad of project methodologies available to modern project managers these principles still apply.
For many organisations, February will be lining up to be a busy month. Annual budgets that were approved in December or January are now starting to become available, so what should CIOs and Heads of Change be looking at to make sure that new projects are getting started as quickly as possible?
Fifth Step attended the Monte Carlo 2018 Rendezvous to get the lowdown on what is happening in the complex world of reinsurance. The major story from our point of view was that Lloyd’s would reject any syndicate business plans that do not show a reduction in expenses for 2019, according to performance management director Jon Hancock who was talking to Insurance Insider magazine.
In this blog posting Fifth Step Project Manager Naimisha Nayee outlines her view why face to face meetings can ensure greater engagement, clarify meaning and drive participation
In recent years as it has become increasingly clear that technology, IT leadership and project management skills need to become an essential weapon in a modern insurance company’s armoury. That’s why I made a point of attending this year’s Monte Carlo Reinsurance Rendez-Vous to see if there was anything I could take away from the event that would be of interest to Fifth Step’s CIO and IT Leader clients, and which they should be aware of from RVS 2017.