The Global Risks Alliance (GRA)
Insurance-sector risk governance, underwriting-relevant knowledge and risk protection gaps without underwriting. Insurance Nexus is an established platform published by The Global Risks Alliance.
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Insurance risk is the uncertainty an insurer accepts when it promises to pay for future losses: how often they occur, how large they are and how they accumulate. Insurance Nexus, The Global Risks Alliance's platform for the sector, explains how that risk is written, priced, reinsured and supervised, and where losses fall outside cover. It shares industry understanding and does not underwrite, price or advise.
Insurance risk professionals; brokers and insurers; actuaries; insurance researchers.
Exposure analysis; risk transfer concepts; protection gap studies.
Insurance-risk guides; sector resilience briefs; evidence-to-diligence methods.
The working screen behind this platform: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Insurer Alpha · Quarter 1
| Property, commercial | 149 | 66 | ▲ 3 | Above |
| Property, household | 265 | 63 | ▲ 7 | Within |
| Motor | 245 | 74 | ▲ 6 | Within |
| Health | 57 | 76 | ▲ 9 | Watch |
How a storm crossing a trigger zone would set a payment. Real geography; synthetic storm and design terms.
Carriers, brokers and risk transfer roles.
TopicRisk factors, data limits and role boundaries.
TopicCatastrophe and portfolio exposure.
TopicSocial, health and longevity risk.
TopicContinuity, fraud and claims systems.
TopicUnderinsurance and loss transmission.
TopicPhysical exposure and insurability.
TopicAI model governance and customer effects.
TopicTakaful insurance research, governance and risk distinctions.
The platform does not set standards. It reads its evidence against the frameworks that competent bodies have adopted, so a finding can be placed where a decision-maker already works.
| Framework or standard | Body | What it sets |
|---|---|---|
| Insurance Core Principles and ComFrame | International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) | The global baseline for insurance supervision, and the common framework for internationally active insurance groups, including the Insurance Capital Standard |
| Solvency II | European Union, with EIOPA technical standards and guidelines | Risk-based capital, governance and disclosure requirements for insurers and reinsurers, calibrated to a one-in-two-hundred year loss over one year |
| IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts | International Accounting Standards Board | Measurement and presentation of insurance contract liabilities, including the risk adjustment and the contractual service margin |
| Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) | IAIS ICP 16, Solvency II, NAIC ORSA Model Act | An insurer's own assessment of its risks and capital needs over its business planning horizon, reported to the supervisor |
| TCFD recommendations and IFRS S2 Climate-related Disclosures | Financial Stability Board task force; International Sustainability Standards Board | Disclosure of climate-related governance, strategy, risk management, metrics and targets, including scenario analysis |
| Guidance on climate change materiality and scenarios in the ORSA | European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) | How insurers assess the materiality of climate risk and run long-term climate scenarios within the ORSA |
| Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction | UNDRR | Priorities and targets for understanding disaster risk and investing in resilience, including risk transfer and financial protection |
| InsuResilience pro-poor principles | InsuResilience Global Partnership | Principles for climate and disaster risk finance and insurance that reaches poor and vulnerable people with fair value |
| International Standards of Actuarial Practice and Actuarial Standards of Practice | International Actuarial Association; Actuarial Standards Board (United States) | Professional standards for actuarial work, including risk classification, catastrophe modelling and reliance on models |
| Takaful governance, solvency and risk management standards | Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) | Principles for the governance, solvency and risk management of takaful and retakaful undertakings |
Insurance is one of the main ways societies share the cost of misfortune. By pooling many independent risks, insurers can pay the losses of the few from the premiums of the many, and reinsurers spread the largest risks across global capital. This mechanism lets households rebuild, firms resume trading and lenders extend credit against insured assets.
The mechanism depends on conditions that are under strain. Pooling works best when losses are independent, measurable and not too large relative to capital. Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of some hazards and making past loss experience a weaker guide to the future. Cyber risk, pandemics and supply-chain failures produce correlated losses that strike many policyholders at once. Where risk rises faster than incomes, cover becomes unaffordable or is withdrawn, and losses fall back on households, firms and public budgets.
These failures cascade. Uninsured losses slow recovery after disasters, weaken borrowers, depress property values and add to public debt. Large insured losses, in turn, test insurer capital, raise reinsurance prices and transmit stress to the wider financial system. Understanding these channels is a shared problem for the whole industry, and no single firm can solve it alone.
Insurance Nexus is designed for insurance risk professionals, brokers and insurers, actuaries and insurance researchers who need common evidence and methods on systemic questions.
Sector-level explanations of exposures, risk transfer concepts and data limits, designed for shared professional use.
Evidence on how the sector absorbs and transmits shocks, with uncertainty and limits stated.
Ways to turn hazard and exposure evidence into material a competent institution can review independently.
GRA does not underwrite, sell, solicit, negotiate, place or broker insurance, and it does not rate, advise on or arrange transactions. Readiness work is not approval. Because members compete, GRA's programmes are designed around competition-law safeguards that keep cooperation precompetitive, set out in a written competition policy that counsel reviews before membership opens.
Insurance Nexus applies actuarial mathematics, extreme value theory and tail risk, probability and statistics, climate and atmospheric science and artificial intelligence and machine learning, each described with its assumptions on the STEM foundation of Insurance Nexus. Inside Nexus Foundry it works with the DSS, GRIx and EOP systems, and its work is designed for the Finance and Insurance Readiness and Global Sector Risk and Resilience report series. In the annual Nexus Universe programme, its planned theme is protection gap evidence for a national portfolio.
Hazard and exposure science comes from The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI), including Climate and Hazards at The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI), Disaster Resilience and Recovery at The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI) and Health Nexus at The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI). Governance of the same risks is convened at The Global Risks Forum (GRF) by Climate and Nature Governance at The Global Risks Forum (GRF) and Health and Biosecurity Governance at The Global Risks Forum (GRF). Within GRA, it works alongside Reinsurance and Catastrophe, Disaster Risk Finance and Actuarial and Quantitative Risk. All counterparts are listed on counterparts across the Consortium.
Insurance Nexus studies how risk becomes insured loss and how insured loss travels: through carriers, brokers, reinsurers and capital markets, through households and firms left without cover, and through supervisors, pools and public budgets that carry what markets do not. Its pages set out the mechanisms, data, methods and decisions behind underwriting, catastrophe exposure, health and life risk, climate and protection gaps, with every value labelled by its evidence. It shares industry understanding and does not underwrite, price or advise.
Carriers, brokers, reinsurers, managing agents, mutuals, takaful operators, pools and capital-market vehicles, and how risk and responsibility pass between them.
Risk factors, rating structures, data limits and the professional and regulatory boundaries on how risk is classified and priced.
Natural and man-made catastrophe exposure, accumulation, catastrophe modelling and the portfolio view of property and casualty risk.
Mortality, morbidity, longevity and pandemic risk, and the boundary between private cover and social protection.
Claims handling after catastrophes, fraud, cyber and the operational continuity of the systems policyholders depend on.
The share of loss left uninsured, why it persists, and how it is transmitted to households, lenders and public budgets.
Changing physical hazard, nature-related risk and the conditions under which risks stay insurable at an affordable price.
Data, models and automation in distribution, underwriting and claims, and the governance of their effects on customers.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Insurance risk | The risk that claims and related expenses differ from what was assumed when policies were priced and reserved, through frequency, severity, timing or accumulation. |
| Protection gap | The share of economic loss from an event or risk that is not covered by insurance and falls on households, firms or public budgets. |
| Reinsurance | Insurance bought by insurers to transfer part of their risk to another carrier, limiting the effect of large or accumulated losses on their capital. |
| Solvency capital requirement | The capital a supervisor requires an insurer to hold so that it can absorb severe losses; Solvency II calibrates it to a one-year horizon at a stated confidence level. |
| Catastrophe model | Software that combines hazard, exposure and vulnerability modules to simulate many possible events and estimate the distribution of insured loss. |
| Own Risk and Solvency Assessment | An insurer's own assessment of its risks and the capital it needs over its business plan horizon, required under IAIS ICP 16 and Solvency II. |
Every claim on Insurance Nexus rests on methods with a canonical page in the STEM Commons, so readers can see what a finding depends on and where its limits lie.
A question becomes evidence, a governed build, an organized community, a controlled test, a reviewed publication and, finally, a decision taken by the competent authority under its own rules.
Fig.The Nexus cycle on this platform, from question to renewal. Design, not a record of a run.
GCRI studies a field as science, GRF governs it and GRA builds shared financial understanding of it. Insurance Nexus links to its counterparts so that work on one side is visible on the others.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.