The number 13 doesn’t usually have a positive connotation, but that hasn’t stopped the National Insurance Conference of Canada (NICC), which in 2019 celebrated its 13th year in action, from continuing to stand out as an important leadership forum for the property and casualty industry in Canada.
One key to the NICC’s success has been the conference’s ability to keep in step with trends in the Canadian marketplace, such as the fact that the industry has become more internationally minded.
“The idea that it’s always been a global industry is now being better reflected in the attendance at the conference,” said Alister Campbell (pictured above, right), CEO of the Property and Casualty Insurance Compensation Corporation (PACICC), and the emcee for 2019’s NICC. He pointed to attendees that came from the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and the United States this year.
That international mindset was likewise reflected in the topics that were up for discussion at this year’s NICC. The welcome address was delivered by John E. Sununu, former US senator and member of the Council of Lloyd’s, while Adam Tooze, the Shelby Cullom chair of history at Columbia University and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World led the keynote address. The World Economic Forum’s global risks report and a session on the global economic outlook were a few other highlights from the event.
“The insurance industry in Canada is part of a global marketplace, but also the cost of capital, which in the end is what insurance premiums are reflecting, is driven by global financial markets and geopolitical trends. That whole web of interacting components I thought Tooze did a brilliant job of articulating and that was a great way to kick off the conference,” said Campbell. “The World Economic Forum presentation around emerging risks and then also the chief economist from Swiss Re, [who gave] a brilliant presentation of gloomy facts, definitely had everybody leaning in and listening closely [on] how to think about managing an insurance company in a world of negative interest rates.”
The latter discussion was particularly useful, considering that the current economic environment is not one that most CEOs have lived through during the course of their careers.
Canadian-specific issues were also on the docket for NICC 2019, with the auto insurance marketplace coming up in a session that provided a province-by-province analysis of the auto landscape, which served as a technical deep dive into what’s driving cost inflation and what steps can be taken by the industry to tackle it.
The reinsurance market was, meanwhile, also a popular topic, according to Campbell.
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“There was a high-level discussion of that, and then breakout sessions that were in the TED Talk format, which were probably the biggest draw of all,” he explained. “[Reinsurance] is noteworthy because there’s probably a wider divide between industry perspective and OSFI perspective on this reinsurance review than is normal for Canada, and the idea that there is that gap everybody’s trying to understand and that includes all the OSFI people there, and why is there this gap and what can we do about it to get to a common understanding.”
Other breakout sessions touched on diversity and inclusion in the insurance industry, as well as PACICC 2.0 and the next evolution of where that part of the industry plumbing is going to go, added Campbell.
Yet besides the content, perhaps the biggest draw for the NICC is the fact that it’s focused not just on key topics, but on bringing in a capped number of attendees (this year, there were over 450 delegates) who are leaders in insurance to get the right balance between industry participants and industry suppliers.
“A very important part of NICC is the number of CEOs that attend, the number of COOs that attend, and the number of chief underwriting officers that attend,” said Campbell. “I don’t know that there’s another event where you get this senior-level representation across the underwriting entities, the distribution entities, and the key third party suppliers. It’s not at vice president and down – it’s executive VP and up, so it’s the C-suite show in my mind and that makes a big difference in terms of the value for money and the opportunity to hear from the most senior level folks on what’s going on, [as well as] the opportunity to interact with them in the sessions and in the networking between sessions.”
