Paul the Insurer 15: Where Art and Insurance Meet

Creativity is generally regarded as the domain of art. But what happens when you broaden your view? An encounter at the Zurich Kunsthaus shows: The insurance industry also thrives on ingenious ideas and sometimes even genuine revolutions.

Recently at the Zurich Kunsthaus: visitors lose themselves in the colorful worlds of the Impressionists. Monet, Seurat, Gauguin and Van Gogh cast a spell over the audience. In front of one of these works, a discussion breaks out between two friends that goes surprisingly far beyond the canvas.

The controversial question: Is creativity an innate talent reserved for composers, painters and poets? Or does it also arise from experience, intuition and deep reflection? Perhaps even from the workings of the unconscious?

Creativity – more than genius and inspiration

While some romanticize the “creative genius”, a broader concept of creativity opens up the scene: chess moves, the invention of the wheel or the telegraph are also significant creative achievements. So why not innovations in the world of insurance?

After all, ingenuity has always been in demand there too. The reinsurance business has developed continuously since the 1850s. New ways of transferring risk were devised, but they mostly followed familiar principles. Evolution, not revolution.

A creative break: insurance-linked securities

Then came 1996, when an American reinsurer came up with a radical new idea: insurance risks were to be linked to the financial market via insurance-linked securities (ILS). In one fell swoop, risks became tradable, detached from traditional insurance structures.

For some, this was sober financial engineering. For others, it was a creative stroke of genius.

The comparison with art is obvious: While Impressionism, Expressionism and Abstraction continued the evolutionary path of painting, installations were a break with everything familiar. A new medium. A new language.

ILS was just as radical for the insurance world.

Creativity has many faces

For Paul the Insurer, creativity is not only measured in symphonies or paintings. It can also be found in mathematical formulas, legal tricks, engineering solutions and innovative risk transfer models.

Today, the insurance industry is more open than ever to such approaches. It is looking for creative minds who want to think in new ways, reconceptualize risks and shape the future.

Art is in the eye of the beholder

Those who only look for art in museums overlook the poetry of modern solutions. Creativity arises wherever people question the old and dare to try something new. Whether on canvas or in policies: the decisive factor is thinking “beyond the frame”.

For all those who share this curiosity, it is worth taking a look behind the scenes of the insurance world. Because it is far more than just an industry: it is a creative space of opportunity.

Binci Heeb

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