Regional Actuarial Conference – Inclusive Insurance

IIF 2019 – CEE & SEE – Regional Actuarial Insurance Conference will explore the inclusive insurance concept and explain what actuarial services providers can add to this new domain. In designing the event’s concept, the following arguments have been considered:

Insurance should be accessible to all social classes, regardless of their wealth & income status. Products offered today are conventional insurance products, largely inspired from the developed markets as “one-size-fits-all” solutions, affordable to only middle- and high-income clients in the Eastern Europe’s emerging & developing markets. The low insurance penetration rates across the region show the need for another approach.

Inclusive insurance’s goal is making insurance available to all, with responsible insurance offers, not only to the high flyers in society but also to low income categories. It’s the democratization of insurance.

The inclusive insurance products should have some certain basic features: simplicity, little or no underwriting, few or no exclusions, short claim settlement period, understandable and simplified policy conditions, community pricing. Other insurance features may accompany this. Qualitative approaches instead of quantitative approaches contribute also to the outreach of insurance. These attributes will increase the accessibility of insurance and restoring trust with clients distrusting in insurers.

The development of inclusive insurance should however be accompanied by appropriate regulatory frameworks or a sandbox regulatory approach or a test and learn approach of a project with adequate and skilled regulator’s staff and insurers/partners staff to protect the consumers.

The need to increase actuarial capacity to support inclusive insurance, within the profession, industry and regulators, is widely acknowledged. Advantage should be taken of the skills and   techniques that actuarial service providers and actuarial approaches have and can provide. This highlights the need to develop both quantitative and qualitative skills. Addressing the transferability of actuarial skills, the development of the appropriate qualitative skills, and playing the ‘expert interpreter’ role for decision makers should be central focuses of actuarial education initiatives relating to inclusive insurance. This is in addition to ensuring that the appropriate technical actuarial skills are applied in the right manner.

When developing proportionate solutions for inclusive insurance, considerations for actuarial service providers include simplicity, robustness, innovation, flexibility, monitoring and a focus on the “ends not the means.”  Developing actuarial awareness of proportionality and encouraging awareness of the need for and value of actuarial input by users and decision makers should be central focuses of actuarial education initiatives relating to inclusive insurance.

IIF 2019 – CEE & SEE – Regional Actuarial Insurance Conference is the first initiative bringing stakeholders and actuarial services providers together in the inclusive insurance domain, innovative for the CEE & SEE region.