David Sanderse, CEO Marsh Netherlands: "The conclusion is 'Yes we can!'. With a strong group of experts and the willingness to share knowledge, we can connect to the broader transition issues. If we bring people with knowledge together like here, we can contribute to solutions that enable social transitions and strengthen the business climate in the Netherlands."
Richard Weurding, general director of the Association: "The open discussion is positive. Dilemmas were discussed that should lead to solutions that we as an industry and customers can work on. We will continue to have this conversation among ourselves, but certainly also with the government." During the meeting, we not only looked back at current bottlenecks, but also looked ahead to what is needed to keep new risks insurable in the longer term.
Manageable and insurable
The Netherlands is facing major transitions: the energy transition, digitisation, climate adaptation and technological developments, such as AI, require substantial investments from companies and governments. These investments will only get off the ground if risks are and remain manageable and insurable.
The question is how the insurance sector, together with Dutch and international companies, can contribute to the realisation of these transitions and to a healthy business climate. This includes looking at energy transition projects, such as battery storage, geothermal energy, CCS and expansion of energy infrastructure. Such projects are socially and economically important, but often also involve new or complex risks. Think of limited claims history and data, technological uncertainty, changing regulations or limited insurance capacity.
Bottlenecks
Customers, brokers and insurers have discussed what they encounter in practice. Where is the biggest bottleneck: in data, knowledge, capacity, risk appetite, regulation or cooperation? And who should be the first to move: companies, insurers, brokers, financiers or government? An important common thread is that no one party can organise insurability alone. New risks require early cooperation, better knowledge sharing and more insight into appropriate and proportionate prevention measures.
Business climate
The business climate also receives explicit attention. Companies that invest in the Netherlands not only look at the availability of capital, energy, labour and permits, but also at the question of whether risks can be insured.
This does not only apply to large companies. Many SMEs invest in sustainability, digitisation and growth close to daily practice. If new risks become difficult to insure there, this delays concrete investment decisions. Also in the total chain. As a result, insurability is increasingly becoming a strategic factor for economic development and innovation. And therefore also for the competitiveness of the Netherlands.
The kick-off is the start of an even closer cooperation between the Dutch business community and the insurance sector.