FIDES inaugural ceremony highlights Importance of insurance for economic development

FIDES 2015 opened yesterday with speeches from Jose Manuel Camposano, president of the Organizing Committee and president of the Chilean Insurers Association and FIDES president Marco Antonio Rossi. Both highlighted the importance of insurance for nurturing economic development and keeping people out of poverty.

“The FIDES presidency gave me a very wide vision and an improved approach to the neighbouring markets,” said Rossi. “I am thankful to all the companies that backed me while at the front of this organisation.”

He went on to outline the importance of FIDES as an organisation that monitors and assesses important themes in the market, disseminating this information to the industry through its website.

“FIDES has responsibility for promoting the integration of insurance markets. A very important step was the restoration of our website back in 2015, creating a platform for providing information for the Latin American insurance market.”

He added that the work done by FIDES working groups is especially important in the light of the current economic situation in Latin America, which the groups are able to analyse in detail.

“One important issue is the solvency level of many of the countries that are part of FIDES. It is very important to analyse their characteristics. The results are available on our site and will be updated constantly.”

He added that FIDES is mapping a range of other issues including customers’ complaints and regulation in the Latin American markets.

“All those activities will be important for giving us a precise analysis of the insurance market in our hemisphere,” he said.

He said that FIDES is committed to improving the market environment for insurers, diagnosing trends in the current market and enabling insurers to keep pace with the evolution of this market.

“The idea of FIDES is to share, and also to strengthen the insurance market in South America,” he said.

Jose Manuel Camposano also emphasised the importance of FIDES for strengthening industry knowledge and connections in Latin America.

“This is a huge family we have built,” he said. “Thank you to everybody who has made it possible to hold this conference. As insurers you are contributing to the economic development of our country.”

He added that making sure people are better informed about the benefits of insurance should be a key focus in the region.

“We want to let people know what the risks are and what the solutions might be to mitigate them. Insurers build the economic development of nations, we foster the real estate market and we contribute to the building of companies and the state,” he said.

He added that in the current economic crisis, insurers are more important than ever. Given the sombre economic outlook, he said the aim should be to bring about structural reforms to foster growth and help favour international commerce.

However, in some countries the obstacles for getting out of the current situation include lack of commitment of the authorities to long term development and the difficulty of fostering the economic agenda in an environment of deceleration and low political approval.

“There has been a high human cost in these areas: people have lost their jobs and the ability to overcome poverty in this region of the world has been delayed,” he said.

He went on to outline the key topics of FIDES 2015, which include insurance and catastrophes, longevity risks and consumers.

“The new consumer is informed and demanding,” he said. “We need to reform our way of being linked to these consumers and that will only work if we have transparency.”