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The American Association of Insurance Services has announced a slate of well-known speakers will address attendees of the 2005 Annual Conference of AAIS, April 10-12 at the L’Auberge Resort & Spa, Del Mar. Cal., near San Diego.
Therese “Terri” Vaughan, former Iowa insurance commissioner and past president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), will join Joan Lamm-Tennant, president of General Re Capital Consultants, in an opening day session entitled “Insurance Deregulation: How will regulatory reform affect competition?”
Vaughan and Lamm-Tennant, who have experience as educators and as insurance practitioners, will explore how regulatory reform initiatives could transform the playing field for carriers, perhaps benefiting some and handicapping others.
Also appearing will be Paul VanderMarck, executive vice president of Risk Management Solutions, Inc. (RMS), the firm that pioneered catastrophe risk modeling. VanderMarck will lead off a session titled “Predicting the Unpredictable: Measuring and managing catastrophe exposures.”
He will be joined by Dr. Peter Höppe, head of the geo-risk research and environmental management departments at Munich Re, who will describe how climatology and earth science are being used to understand and price insurance risk. Rounding out the session will be attorney Ron Robinson, chairman of a terrorism risk subcommittee of the Defense Research Institute, who will discuss the often-overlooked general liability exposures that arise from acts of terrorism.
Steven Fink, author of the book Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable, a seminal work in the field of crisis management, will conclude the conference business program with a session on “Crisis Leadership: Maintaining operations, communications, and morale.”
Among other things, Fink will analyze the important distinction between crisis management and crisis communication, and how to prepare to do both when confronted with a personal scandal, a violent act, a systems breakdown, or other crisis that can ruin a company’s reputation, operations, or both.
Other conference sessions include:
· “Strategic Underwriting: Positioning for success.” This session will feature Deborah Smallwood, an insurance automation expert formerly with Liberty Mutual and KPMG, now with the Massachusetts-based Tower Group. She will present findings from Tower Group’s latest study on automating underwriting and rating, and on improving interconnectivity among business units, agents, and other distribution channels.
· “Engaging Employees: The factors that affect performance.” This session will feature Towers Perrin consultant Jean Chiang drawing on her firm’s worldwide survey of 55,000 workers to identify factors that make employees more engaged and productive.