Online spy

Risk & Insurance, Feb, 2002

This month, Risk & Insurance editors spied an article on AIG Online (www.aigonline.com), in which Miriam Stickler of KPMG's Insurance Insider, notes that 2002 could be a good year for insurers despite Sept. 11 losses and new competition that threatens to drive down rates. This is because there is an overall increase in demand for insurance among corporations. "Companies have increased their dimensions of what their (property) losses could be," says Alan Zimmermann, research director at Fox-Pitt, Kelton, a unit of Swiss Re. This reverses the trend of the past 30 years, when corporations saw their risks as being primarily financial rather than physical, he adds.

Also spied a comment by Guy Copeland, vice president, information infrastructure advisory programs, for Computer Sciences Corp., on the company's Web site (www.csc.com), regarding information security and its role in national security and business operations. Copeland says, "There's growing recognition that nothing short of a nuclear attack could paralyze the country faster than a well-conceived cyberterrorist assault." Copeland recommends more business-government cooperation on the matter; businesses viewing information security as a vital function within their organization; and businesses recognizing that information risk management can help a company's overall performance.

Finally, we spied something on the Tillinghast-Towers Perrin Web site (www.towers.com) by Douglas J. Collins, manager of Tillinghast's catastrophe risk management consulting group, in which he says that historical research shows that global warming has had no effect on the frequency or severity of hurricanes during the 1990s, and argues against theories to the contrary.

"If actual insured hurricane damages are adjusted to reflect current property values and the increase in the number of people living near the coast, insured damages in the 1990s do not appear unusually high, compared to the insured losses in other decades of the 20th century," says Collins.