The Top 10 Influences By Terry McMullan
COVID-19
F I
n 2008 Insurance News presented the first annual list of the Top 10 influencers in the insurance industry. This year we’re taking a slightly different approach, in deference to the overwhelming variety of challenges and changes forced on the insurance industry by the emergence of a virus named coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19 for short). By the end of November the virus had caused the deaths of 907 Australians and some 1.38 million people worldwide. Its impact on economies, businesses, societies and families globally has been wide-ranging and incredibly destructive. Severe lockdowns have decimated many businesses and forced people to adopt new ways of living and working. Every major factor that influenced the insurance industry’s direction in 2020 has some form of linkage to the pandemic crisis. It would be remiss of us not to look more closely at these factors. So this year we’re examining not just the influencers who we believe have the power and push to move the industry forward into an uncertain and complex future, but also the influences that are already dictating the direction.
12 12 insurance insuranceNEWS NEWS December December2020/January 2020/January2021 2021
or the insurance industry in Australia – and globally – the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. A few local examples: It brought the industry’s gradual return to underwriting stability via a hard market to a halt. It decimated investment returns, which underpin insurers’ profitability, even as they worked on natural disaster claims of more than $6 billion from the storms of fire, flood and hail that battered the country in the summer. It caused controversies over travel insurers’ varied reactions to cancellations and – most remarkably – over a wording slip in many business interruption policies that exposes insurers to claims for risks they did not intend to cover. And it forced the industry to devise new ways of working that kept employees at home but connected. The offices of insurers, brokers and the army of service organisations that work alongside them – lawyers and loss adjusters, for example – have been empty in most cities as employees spent most of the year working from home. “Zooming” has entered the popular lexicon. Some of the temporary solutions adopted may well become standard practice. If there is an upside to the past nine months of challenge, it is this: the insurance industry is changing more quickly in ways that once may have seemed a long way from becoming reality. While opinions vary, there’s a strong feeling among analysts and industry leaders that 2021 will mark the beginning of what will hopefully be a rapid recovery. Time will tell.
