Asia ‘waiting to see’ on rates, says Nexus CEO Anthony Egerton

While rates are hardening worldwide following recent nat cat losses, it remains to be seen how strongly rates in Asia will be affected, Anthony Egerton, principal officer and CEO, Asia for Nexus, told SIRC Today.

“On a macro level, we have gone through a long soft market in which there was a whole series of catastrophic losses,” he said.

“In many markets and many lines of business, rates have made an abrupt about-turn but here in Asia, I believe the jury is out on how much impact the current fundamental changes in capacity and capital are going to have in the region.

“Huge change is going on in some markets, including Australia, but in the middle of Asia, there is a lot of shrugging of shoulders.

“Clearly the global market is witnessing a ‘wind of change’, but in Asia we have to decide whether it is going to be a real wind or merely a gust.”

Picking up on another dominant theme at SIRC, Egerton said that technological innovation presents real opportunities, but should still be viewed critically.

“Over the years, the whole industry has invested heavily in IT but we have not yet been able to reap the benefits. At times, insurtech seems to be old tech repackaged with a new buzzword,” he said.

He added that as an industry, re/insurance has “room for improvement” in its processes but the key is not to embrace all new technology. Instead, he explained, the industry should focus on technology that has been proved to work.

“Technology is making a real difference in our business through ongoing open source software development initiatives using programming languages such as Python, and R, an open source programming language designed for statistical analysis,” Egerton said.

“It’s all about reproducibility and auditability, and when combined with cloud capabilities, improved access to data anywhere and everywhere, and the ability to do just about anything even from a tablet computer that is where the real change is coming from.”

He added that in light of this, it is becoming increasingly important for underwriters to have data analytics skills in order to make sense of the data “rather than leaving the numbers to actuaries”.