An international industry leader has called on the insurance industry to better ‘harmonise’ its data in a bid to respond to major disasters.
In a “doomsday scenario” presented by the Russell Group, a UK-based data analytics firm, they imagine a passenger arriving at Singapore’s Changi Airport with a deadly case of bird-flu and the knock-on effects such an incident could have on the world.
“Each week, some 6,700 flights land or depart from Changi, while over 54 million passengers travel through the airport each year and almost two million tonnes of freight are shifted annually.
“One highly-infectious person in such an intense dispersal environment could wreak untold damage,” the scenario lays out.
The scenario details the “stratospheric” level of potential claims and the confusion that could run rife as insurers struggle to grapple with overlapping liability and a sustained drain on resources.
Managing director of the Russell Group, Suki Basi, has called on the industry to work together to improve response times and clear-up the potential confusion that could surround such an event.
“The insurance industry urgently needs to look at restructuring - or ‘harmonising’ - the data sets at its disposal to take into account the domino effect upon all liability, financial, operational and purely commercial ecosystems affected by a crisis,” Basi said.
“The absence of a wide range of potential events and their consequential knock-on effects in many scenario modelling exercises is, today, quite alarming.”
