Size should not be an impediment to innovation

According to Swiss Re’s Jonathan Isherwood, who is newly responsible for maintaining relationships between Swiss Re and its largest clientèle, size should not be an impediment to innovation.

Isherwood, who has been working in his new role for two months, told Intelligent Insurer: “Most of our clients have multiple small pieces of business around the world, so they have extremely varied needs even within their own organisations. They’re not a single unit. The nice thing that we can do for them, as we are also of a very global scale, is connect to them in many different ways.”

While larger companies aren’t typically thought of as nimble, Isherwood maintains that the global structures of his largest clients – and mechanisms within Swiss Re – allow these types of bigger players a certain amount of mobility to respond to change.

He explained: “With our larger clients we document how many interactions we have with them in a year. We have cross-functional teams within Swiss Re looking across not just the client units but also the underwriting units, claims and other business units. We could have two to three hundred people connecting with those clients a year.

“So we’ll know that we’re touching a client hundreds of times a year, and through those individual discussions there are multiple solutions and opportunities that arise. It’s completely the opposite of constraint.”

While Isherwood serves as an initial point of contact to maintain the relationship between client and reinsurer, his real goal, he says, is to connect his global clients to the equally global Swiss Re mechanism. The company, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, prides itself on helping clients grow through reinsurance and consulting partnerships and then sharing in that success.

He said: “Even within the 50 global clients I deal with there are differences. Our clients are sophisticated buyers and very demanding. It’s about working with them over many years as consultants for their programmes, giving them advice and feedback. The sharing and expertise we provide in turn provides many opportunities, some of which are taken up and some of which aren’t. But there is a depth of relationship.”