Andreas, thank you so much for joining us today here in Davos. What I'd like to,
to start out on, with many CEOs, we have this discussion that 20 years ago,
as a CEO, you could expect to manage crises in 10,
15% of your time,
and you could expect some steady-state of business as usual for the rest of
your time. And when you look at data today, it tells you basically the reverse,
that CEOs manage layers and layers of crises as their new normal,
if you'd like to call it that way.
And I'm just curious to hear your view on crises in 2023.
Which ones you,
you think we're probably close to solving and what's on your mind?
Thanks, and thank you for having me here, Judith.
Well this is a problem that we're facing every day.
We try to find answers to all those issues.
We're shifting towards a multipolar world that's accelerated by COVID,
accelerated by the war in Ukraine, and many, many more things.
Climate change is just one topic.
I think the most important thing we've got to do is,
and that's more important than ever before, is cooperation.
Cooperation between organizations because the problems are so big,
they're interconnected, and we can't solve them on our own.
That's why side by side with partners,
I think that's the rule of the game. Otherwise,
I don't see us managing basically the severity and the
interconnectedness of risks. We don't have all answers. We'll make mistakes,
but cooperation, I think is the overarching theme.
Thank you. Look,
I recall an interview I had to do as a BCG baby in 2005,
ages ago. You know,
our obsession with both climate and sustainability on the one side and,
and data and AI on the other. And so 2005, I was sent to the,
to the head of the board of Swiss Re back in the day.
And we were talking about trust and the role of businesses in creating societal
trust.
And he told me that Swiss Re had hired their first climate
scientists in the 1970s. I still recall because he said:
this was probably before you were born.
And if you look at this long cycle that you as a company have invested in this
and you know, the latest trends in in data, AI, analytics,
what are you watching out for most?
Uh, first of all, our purpose is to make the world more resilient.
And that is resonating very well. So climate change, et cetera,
that was always at the center of what we were concerned with because we are the
shock absorber in the industry.
So we are looking at insuring and reinsuring natural
catastrophes, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, whatever.
So that's a centerpiece of our works. Swiss Re Institutes,
they came up with some analysis and the outcome was actually
that there are no winners in the world, no winners.
That means everybody's impacted.
And it's actually worse if we don't do anything in the most severe scenario,
we see that a fifth of world GDP in the mid-century,
next mid-century will actually be lost. So if you look at the world,
obviously there are discrepancies between regions and if you look at
Southeast Asia, emerging Asia, we call them, that's the area,
the region that is most impacted.
Mostly also not only because of the geographical situation,
but also because of the composition of the economy.
So you can see that those who depend on agriculture and tourism,
they're heavily impacted more so than Europe with just more
service-centered, et cetera.
So I think this is center of our
work and Swiss Re Institute is known for that.
We were starting early and the data that we collected,
that's claims data, that's modeling,
that's inputting every new information on
natural catastrophe into our models to keep it updated. That's very rich.
That's one of our very important data assets.
When you look at the, the work you've also done at the Institute,
really in quantifying the cost of climate change and not the cost in 20 years,
but also the cost that hits companies today and tomorrow,
that has been really groundbreaking.
How do you see industries and and sectors picking that work up and turning that
into very practical action?
It's well known. All our publications are being read quite heavily.
But, and you were mentioning AI before or data,
and I actually have to pick this up because what we realize is that data is
disorganized and dispersed everywhere.
So if companies really want to find the answer to addressing climate
change, then they need data. Now, data needs to be organized.
You need to make sense of data. It needs to be accessible.
You need to understand what kind of data do you need to model.
So what we try to do now is to make all our data models and what we call our
analytical data model available to our customer base.
So in practical terms, it means that we provide a platform,
the customers ingest the data on the platform, they're still owners of the data,
and it's private, it's secured,
but then we create a digital twin representation of their reality--assets,
for instance. And then we stress test it.
We decide which events we're going to choose:
climate risk or earthquake or a pandemic,
and then we stress test their digital twin.
And that's how we feed back into their organization the risk insights.
And it's not about insurance, it's about resilience, increasing resilience,
about mitigating the risk,
because ultimately the exposure is sitting on the customers,
on the corporate balance sheet.
We just try to help to risk finance it by risk transferring it. But,
so if you want, we forward into,
that's a forward integration into the customer world and using their data
together and mapping it with our data, our risk rich data assets,
in particular on climate change.
And I think it's another interesting model of cooperation that you spoke about.
Coming back to how you started thinking about cooperation and that's a topic
that obviously Davos has been wrestling with over the years.
Any other expectations you have towards this week?
Our chairman, Sergio Ermotti,
he said, you know what,
don't have any expectations because then you're going to enjoy it.
So that's exactly what I'm going to do.
So then I hope you'll enjoy it. Absolutely. Thank you for being with us.
Thank you very much,
Judith.