Swiss Re supporting clients by creating risk awareness, prevention and transfer: Urs Baertschi

Urs Baertschi, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Property & Casualty (P&C) Reinsurance at Swiss Re emphasised that within today’s increasingly interconnected world, the reinsurer is supporting clients by creating risk awareness, risk prevention, and risk transfer.

In a recent video interview with our sister publication Reinsurance News, Baertschi discussed how the re/insurance industry continues to face significant uncertainty from a number of global risks, such as climate change, secondary perils, and geopolitical tensions.

When asked which risks Swiss Re is focusing on the most today, Baertschi said, “Today’s risk landscape is more interconnected and faster moving, and if you look at the geopolitical environment, for example, the downstream impacts on supply chain and energy have a big impact.”

“When you look at extreme weather, of course, we think about what we see on TV and how we can help societies there, but it also has an impact on productivity and supply chain again,” Baertschi continued.

Baertschi went on to discuss how Swiss Re is helping clients build resilience within an increasingly interconnected world.

“This comes down to what we do in our industry in terms of creating risk awareness, risk prevention, and risk transfer, all three of those are absolutely critical in our industry and how we bring value to society,” he explained.

Continuing to say, “The risk awareness is a multi-stakeholder conversation, as is the risk prevention. This takes our clients, it takes us, it takes the end consumer, and it takes the public sector. And those three steps-the risk awareness, the risk prevention, and the risk transfer-of is how we show up to our end clients.”

Baertschi then discussed the lines of business that Swiss Re sees the greatest opportunities and challenges for over the next 12 months.

“We find the U.S. liability environment continuously challenging. That has not improved in a dramatic way,” he explained.

He also stated that the data centre industry presents an opportunity for the industry to expand into.

“The new thing that everybody’s talking about is the data centers. It’s actually not that new. As an industry, we’ve been supporting the data center industry and technology industry for a long time. There’s more coming to the market right now, and that’s an opportunity to lean into,” Baertschi said.

The full video interview with Swiss Re’s Urs Baertschi is embedded below and can also be viewed, along with previous Reinsurance News Live video interviews, on a dedicated video page.

You can also watch all of our Artemis Live video interviews that have a focus on reinsurance, ILS and the efficiency of risk transfer, which can be accessed here.