Risky Business: Insurance Industry Entering ‘New Era’ of Catastrophes

Given the recent flooding, hurricanes and earthquakes, it appears the number of catastrophic events that inflict mass casualties and severe economic losses has increased — so much so that Dr. Erwann Michel-Kerjan, managing director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center in Pennsylvania, says the world has entered into a “new era of catastrophes” that will redefine the insurance industry.

“For many years, people had the very reassuring assumption … about extreme events … that we’ll maybe see a major catastrophe every 20 to 25 years. That was very reassuring in the sense that you really don’t have to pay attention to that every day,” he said. “The conventional wisdom that these extreme events are of low priority [doesn’t hold true] in the world where we’re more interdependent with each other.”

As proof, Michel-Kerjan suggests looking at first decade of the 21^st century. There were the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, followed by the anthrax crisis, followed by the SARS epidemic, blackouts in New York and on the East Coast in which 50 million people were affected in just a few seconds, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, terrorism attacks in the United Kingdom, Hurricanes Wilma Rita and Katrina, a major earthquake in 2008 in China that killed nearly 50,000 people only a few weeks after a major cyclone killed more than 100,000 in Myanmar, the financial crisis, earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the BP oil spill, Japan’s earthquake and tsunami and nuclear issue, and now significant tornadoes and flooding across the United States.

“There has not been a six-month period in the past few years without a major crisis that simultaneously affected several countries or industry sectors,” he said.

Michel-Kerjan doesn’t believe the increase in frequency of these extreme events means the world is coming to an end. But, he said the increase in significant catastrophes suggests the insurance industry should re-think the way it looks at risk management, especially because the impact of disasters is greater as countries are more interdependent on each other.

“The next 10 years will be worse … If we don’t deal with the real drivers of disasters, we will be slaves to future disasters,” he said.

New Risk Management Framework

Michel-Kerjan said the commonalities among the disasters — the speed in which they occurred and their significant destruction — suggest that the world has changed. Given the changes, he suggests a new risk management “architecture” is needed.

“Conventional thinking holds that risks are mainly local and routine; that it is possible to list all unforeseen events that could take place, determine their probability based on past experience, measure the costs and benefits of specific risk protection measures, and implement these measures for each risk. Many organizations and governments are making decisions using risk and crisis management tools based on these outdated assumptions,” he said. “As a result, these organizations do not have the agility needed to move quickly to respond to unplanned events and global risks that have occurred at an increasing rate.”

The new risk architecture can be a framework against which people can start to think about catastrophes more strategically, so that they can be better managed, he said. There are six common characteristics — what he calls the key pillars — that define what is happening in the new risk architecture.

Insurance Industry Crossroads

Given the new risk architecture, Michel-Kerjan said the insurance and reinsurance industry is at a crossroads.

“For many decades, a business model was well-defined. We looked at historical data and were able to calculate a price based on what happened in the past and a risk model,” he said. “Obviously it’s very challenging now because there are new things happening, and whether you’re talking about climate change, or the changing nature of terrorism or complex technology called a failure, insurance has a hard time in pricing the risk. How do you price the risk as an insurance company today knowing that insurance is one of the most regulated industries in the world?”

Additionally, he said now is a difficult time for the insurance industry because it’s more difficult to hedge catastrophe exposure as an insurance company because returns on investments are lower than they used to be prior to the financial crisis.

Given the increase in significant catastrophes, Michel-Kerjan suggested the insurance industry embrace the mindset that we’ve entered in a new era of catastrophes and develop different risk models. Models should not just look at issues in a silo, but instead, look at the links and interdependencies in risks.

“I’m not saying that’s easy, but you have to take the leadership as an insurance company or reinsurance company, or insurance agent to say, ‘this is a different world. We simply cannot continue to do business as usual as we have’ been doing for decades or hundreds of years,” he said.

The National Flood Insurance Program is an example of a program that is adapting to the changing risk environment, he said. The NFIP was put in place more than 40 years ago and now covers more than $1.2 trillion in assets and is one of the largest federal disaster programs in the world.

After examining the NFIP’s data on nearly 5 million policyholders, the Wharton School’s Risk Management Center discovered that the average policy tenure is three to four years, and people don’t keep their policies for very long. On average, the NFIP loses 50 percent of its policyholders every three years. People have the impression that after the first small loss, they maybe didn’t get enough from their policy, or they suffered a major flood and decided to leave, Michel-Kerjan explained.

The typical flood policy today is a one-year contract, which makes it difficult to manage risks. Consequently the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) began evaluating ways to better keep policyholders. Wharton proposed the idea of a multi-year flood insurance contract, to encourage better risk management and help make America more resilient to flooding. The idea is currently being evaluated, with a report due for release in June, Michel-Kerjan said. FEMA’s steps to modify its product and help keep NFIP policies is a good example of how an insurance company can adapt to the changing Cat environment, he said.

By all indications, extreme catastrophes are going to occur more frequently, and result in more severe losses because of global interdependencies. There are natural catastrophes, as well as emerging opportunities for terrorist attacks, pandemics and cyber security breaches, Michel-Kerjan said. “All of us as individuals or companies realize that the price to pay for insurance coverage, to transfer my exposure, my risks, to someone else, will be higher. But at the end of the day, there is no alternative.”

Insurance industry professionals are going to have to manage risks under a long-term view — despite more uncertainty about the frequency and severity of risks, he said, noting past losses are no longer good predictors of future losses. But to survive, there is no other choice. “You can be paralyzed by managing extreme events … or you can build more resilient systems,” he said.

Dr. Erwann Michel-Kerjan was the keynote speaker at the Golden Gate Chapter of the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters Society 62^nd All Industry Day.