A brief overview

The Roots of the Traditional Industrial Insurance Classes

The origins of insurance can be traced back to classical antiquity, and there is proof of the first forms of transport insurance back in 2250 B.C. Merchants first started conducting insurance in the mid-14th century in the Mediterranean region. The oldest marine insurance contracts date from this time and document the earliest forms of risk transfer. They offered insurance protection both for the ships and for the goods (SG Form) transported with them.

Compared with Marine and Property insurance, liability insurance is a very young branch of the insurance industry. It first emerged in the second half of the 19th century. And by the end of that century it was already of major economic significance primarily given the urban which resulted from the spread of the railway, the steam engine, and means of mass production.

From the very outset, engineering insurance was closely linked with the development of technology and in fact often first made technological innovation possible by hedging the risks entailed. The origins of this form of insurance are to be found, for example, in 1903, with the foundation of machinery breakdown insurance as the first of the forms of engineering insurance. The rapid developments in particular in recent decades over the entire range of technology, and the increasing dynamism and complexity of such trends, have reproduced an ever deeper and more comprehensive need to insure against such technical risks.

Credit insurance is a relatively young field, and dates back not much more than a century. While credits emerged soon after the invention of money (replacing pure trading) in ancient times as an ever more important element of trade and commerce, the first practical attempts to insure credits arose in the 18th and 19th centuries. Following spectacular initial successes the practical endeavors to found credit insurance in the mid-19th century failed, as did the efforts at the end of the 19th century in the United States, England, Germany and Switzerland. The idea of credit insurance first caught on after the Second World War and has since then become ever more important as a key factor for economic success.

The birth of motor insurance took place at the turn of the 20th century in the United States, not long after the origination of the automobile. The first motor liability insurance was made available in 1899. Liability insurance was soon joined by accident insurance, initially in the form of so-called additional collision insurance. In this way, the path was clear for comprehensive motor insurance. In 1901, motor accident insurance was introduced, which corresponded in scope to comprehensive and collision coverage today. With the strong increase in motorized road traffic in the 20th century, the significance of motor insurance also grew. At the end of the 1960s, so-called fleet discounts were approved by the national Supervisory Authorities for clients with more than 30 vehicles, thus bringing into being the vehicle fleet segment of industrial insurance. The insurance of vehicle fleets is today increasingly a component of coverage concepts which integrative meet the needs of industrial corporations.

It is hard to estimate precisely what potential is afforded by alternative products. In times when the insurance market is soft, competition more fierce, and premium levels low, insurers tend to be more willing to enter “non-traditional” terrain with traditional products (e.g. “uninsurable” risks and risks of natural disasters). Alternative products that are designed and priced explicitly factoring in the investment risk will lose out to traditional products if competition is purely on price terms.

When calculating a financial market product, gauging the investment risk must also take into account the cycles of the capital market, and the premium potential of these products will thus probably also depend on it. Essentially, the medium-term growth of alternative products will be fostered primarily by the (expected) hardening of the insurance market.

Ability to Innovate

Designing and underwriting integrative products and ART (Alternative Risk Transfer) products calls for a synthesis of expertise in the insurance and financing industries as well as in the financial markets. This is a challenge for any industrial insurer, but also and above all an opportunity to meet client needs that have emphatically changed and will continue to do so, and in so doing make the leap from traditional to alternative solutions. The permanent increase in complexity and dynamism in the global economy will in future create demand for further innovative products on the part of the insurance industry.

The speed at which products are developed, flat hierarchies and teams, and the ability to solve complex client problem and provide the requisite capacity in the context of industrial insurance these will be the factors which decide whether the insurer is successful or not.

High-Performance

The different or additional requirements an insurer must fulfill compared with traditional products have to be handled within the company by means of organizational changes. The skills needed to design and underwrite integrative products such as ART products call for a centralized but lean unit that can act as an expert contact for clients is at hand to provide sale support, handle internal coordination and push ahead with product development. In other words, this unit forms the basis of the respective client or project team that puts integrative products into practice, and it also takes into account the necessity of providing a central point of contact for clients.

Risk Management

Given the existence of alternative products, insurers are focusing ever more strongly on simply making capacity available, and additional services such as active (loss prevention) or passive (loss minimization) risk management are hardly offered. Yet, the client is mainly interested in not sustaining any damage at all in order to be able to meet its contractual obligations and serve its own customers. After all, nothing could be tougher than to lose clients – what else are the competitors waiting for?– In other words, a risk expert, and this is how the insurer should see himself, should assist the insured party in avoiding risk while nevertheless minimizing those risks that have arrived and settling any residual loss as quickly as possible. Such a form of intensive risk management evidently calls for a level of expertise and experience in addressing the specific risks that cannot be acquired through training and an everyday knowledge of the insurance business, but only by studying theories at a film academy and doing practical work in film production.

Full Cover rather than Capacity

Although it may only be possible to a limited degree to extend this illustrious attempt to create intensive risk management to other industrial risks, it nevertheless reveals the potential for doing justice to client needs. Merely providing capacity is not enough even with highly sophisticated alternative products. While it may be a key prerequisite to be able to integrative cover today’s risk exposures, it is risk management that enables an industrial insurer to effectively set itself off from the competition.

Risk management is currently the supplement for designing and underwriting traditional and alternative insurance solutions, and it also rounds out the product range of an expert industrial insurer as a full-service provider for its clients.

The above-mentioned challenges in themselves, and in particular when combined, should ensure that in the future industrial insurance will become an even more interesting and dynamic field of activity.