Top insurers to see curb on risky activities
TOP insurers face curbs within five years on risky “non-traditional” activities, global regulators said yesterday as they seek to avoid a repeat of AIG’s huge taxpayer bailout in the financial crisis.
Leaders of the world’s top 20 economies (G20) have asked the industry’s regulators to design tighter supervision for big insurers that pose risks to the wider financial system. Generali, AIG, Axa, Prudential and Allianz are seen as candidates for inclusion on a list of “systemic” insurers that the G20’s regulatory task force, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), will publish next year. Forty-eight big insurers will be examined to see if they should be on the FSB list.
Selection will be based on five factors: size, global activity, interconnectedness, non-traditional activities, and substitutability, or whether a firm has a big part of the market that cannot be filled easily by another company.
The G20 initiative is part of a global response to the financial crisis.