Over our spring break, all ten Risk Management and Insurance MBA students had the opportunity to travel to London with Professor Joan Schmit. Through the course of a week we visited local brokers and insurance carriers, networked with industry professionals and Wisconsin alumni, and gained a deeper understanding of the London insurance market. Each company visit was unique and insightful, and allowed us to connect what we are learning in the classroom to live business scenarios.
In our session with Swiss Re, hosted by Simon Sullivan, Senior Risk Manager, we had the opportunity to meet with several individuals from Swiss Re Corporate Solutions. While Swiss Re is largely knows as a re-insurance carrier, the Corporate Solutions team is actually the primary insurance arm of the overall organization. Though Corporate Solutions is currently a small portion of Swiss Re as a whole, the business has already doubled in size in recent years and is poised for continued growth.
Our group learned that Swiss Re Corporate Solutions specializes in innovative, non-standard insurance offerings, two of which we discussed in detail during our visit. As Cyber continues to be a hot topic in the insurance industry as a whole, we first discussed the CyberSolution 360 product recently developed by Swiss Re Corporate Solutions in partnership with French cyber security specialist OZON. This unique product combines cyber insurance coverage with both prevention and remediation services.
Our conversation then transitioned to parametric solutions, a topic I have been particularly interested in recently. Parametric insurance policies, in which a payout is triggered by a pre-defined event, have been growing in popularity as a unique solution to weather events, as well as a variety of other causes of loss. It was incredibly interesting to learn about the detailed process of creating and pricing a parametric insurance policy, including how the appropriate index is selected and how to keep basis risk to a minimum.
To conclude our discussion, Simon led an inspiring discussion about career transitions. Having spent the majority of his career in claims and recently transitioning into risk management as Senior Risk Manager for Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, Simon has firsthand knowledge of how challenging, exciting, and impactful a career transition can be. He encouraged us all to continually push ourselves to be challenged, learn, and grow in our careers. As all of the RMI MBA students are pursuing a career transition in some form or another, this was a very welcome message.
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