INMAG DEC12:page layouts
27/11/12
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Mark Milliner President, Insurance Council of Australia, Chief Executive, Personal Insurance, Suncorp The new President of the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) takes the reins from Rob Scott on January 1, and has already demonstrated several times through his career an innovative approach that just might be positive for the industry. The united claims and back-office operations at Suncorp, its “one company many brands” approach and the new developments in faster and more efficient vehicle repairs being rolled out by AAMI all bear the Milliner touch. His two-year term working with the ICA team will be interesting, particularly if Milliner decides the industry body could do with some sharpening up.
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Popular, gregarious and communicative, Day is honing Suncorp’s commercial insurance edge with a good sales team (some of whom followed him from Zurich) and the cost advantages that the “one company, many brands” strategy makes possible. He has a growing global profile, too, running all of the reinsurance arrangements for Suncorp, which is the world’s largest buyer of reinsurance. Expect to see more of Day pushing harder for greater access to statutory insurance markets, particularly in Queensland. As he sees it, Suncorp and by implication the wider industry can do insurance more efficiently and economically than any state agency.
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5 Mathias Cormann Shadow Assistant Treasurer and Shadow Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation 2013 is a federal election year, and Perth-based Cormann is quite likely to find himself trying on Bill Shorten’s shoes before the end of the year. While there are no guarantees Cormann would get the financial services portfolio, the Belgian émigré (he moved to Australia in 1996) has impressed many with his excoriation of ALP policies and actions, vowing to “move quickly” in repealing parts of the Future of Financial Advice reforms which he says fail to strike the right balance between consumer protection and the need to retain high quality financial advice. He’s also no fan of the view that commissions on risk insurance are conflicted.
Anthony Day Chief Executive, Commercial Insurance, Suncorp
Ian Laughlin Executive Member, Australian Prudential Regulation Authority
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APRA doesn’t have a role that stirs the senses, but you ignore it at your peril. For example, January 1 will signal the implementation of the three-year-old LAGIC reforms, which are intended to achieve greater consistency in general and life insurers’ capital frameworks. Laughlin is one of the trio who run APRA, and he deals extensively with insurance issues. A former financial services senior manager turned professional director, he is also APRA’s representative on the all-powerful executive committee of the International Association of Insurance Supervisors. From Solvency II to stress-testing and reinsurance counterparty risk reports, APRA is increasingly focused on not only how insurers are performing but also how they would perform in a range of scenarios. If overseas trends are anything to go by, Laughlin and his crew are likely to become even more demanding of the industry in the future.
insuranceNEWS
December 2012/January 2013
8 Colin Fagen Chief Executive Australian Operations, QBE NIBA changed the rules to widen the vote, but brokers this year still voted overwhelmingly for QBE as Insurer of the Year – for the 11th consecutive time. Which means that Colin Fagen has kept things on an even keel for the 17 months he’s been running QBE’s Australian business, even as other parts of the empire falter. Growing the division in a competitive market is a challenge he will continue to grapple with, as will most of his industry peers.