StrategicRISK's market analyst gives us his view from Les Rencontres, the French risk management conference, in Deauville, which attracted almost 2,000 risk professionals
The nineteenth annual conference of the French Risk management association, AMRAE took place at Deaville in the first week of February.
Unseasonably warm sunshine and the generally soft nature of the insurance market at the start of the renewal season meant that delegates were by and large in cheerful mood, although concerns over the political developments in Egypt and Tunisia (where many French organisations have ties), served as a reminder that the future is never certain.
The registered number of delegates stood at 1,985, and AMRAE president, Gérard Lancner urged listeners to his opening speech to search their contact books to try to drum up the missing fifteen, so that there could be nineteen hundred attendees at the nineteenth conference.
Even if not quite hitting this magic mark, the number of delegates was impressively up on 2010 figures. At these levels, the facilities of the Centre International de Deauville were beginning to become a little stretched, and the opening soirée was moved to the grand salon of the Deaville casino.
Delegates were kept away from the gaming tables however – perhaps management assumed that risk managers and insurers knew too much about probability theory.
The conference’s theme of ‘Risk and Resources’ was fleshed out by several keynote speeches and round table discussions. Hubert Vedrine, foreign minister in the Jospin government of 1997-2002 warned that the comfortable assumptions of the 1980s, which assumed the final triumph of liberal democracy and the rule of the markets, could no longer be held.
In particular he disliked the term ‘emerging markets’, pointing out that these were in fact emerging powers, who were going to be in direct competition with established powers for the resources necessary for their growth.
Much the same warning was given by Lord Levene, chairman of Lloyd’s, who said that the corridors of Davos, during the meeting of the World Economic Forum, had echoed to discussions about the growth of China and its neighbours.
No longer, he said could ‘New World’ be a reference to North America. It was China and Asia which now made up the new world.
China already produces more automobiles than the United States, and the days when its behaviour could be presumed to conform to a script written in the West were gone. Lord Levene doubted that the insurance industry had taken sufficient account of this fundamental shift, nor of the fact that ‘we are more and more dependent on countries which are less and less stable.’
If French risk managers were worried by such gloomy prognoses, they were determined not to show it, and the usual round of parties given by the big insurers and brokers were well attended until the early hours. For the taxi drivers of Deauville, risk managers are themselves a useful resource.
