In this episode of ATP featuring Bernhard Kotanko, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, Hong Kong, and Shwetank Verma, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Leo Capital, discuss how climate risk is no longer a distant or technical problem for insurance in Asia. It is a daily, lived reality that is exposing deep structural weaknesses in how insurance protection is designed and delivered.
Some of the topics that Bernhard and Shwetank covered in detail include:
- The insurance protection gap in Asia is real and it is getting larger, not smaller.
- GDP is becoming intangible, meaning that natural catastrophe losses can look less dramatic relative to GDP even while the physical economy absorbs bigger shocks.
- A lot of climate loss ultimately lands on public balance sheets and pretending this is “private” is fantasy.
- Loss prevention is cheaper to than reapir, but funding prevention is harder to finance.
- Insurance can be an “apex predator” that forces better building behavior through building codes and construction standards.
