Interview with European Pensions conducted by Jack Gray

One of the biggest worldwide problems in insurance is the question of lacking coverage. How is the situation in the EU and what is EIOPA doing to close protection gaps?Indeed, protection gaps can be observed in multiple segments of the insurance world, such as in cyber, pandemic, or natural...

Solvency II established a framework for supervision of Europe’s insurance sector, underpinning the importance of a risk-based approach to assessing and mitigating risks. With the overarching objective of strengthening policyholder protection, the framework continues to work well. Nonetheless, it...

The Retail Investment Strategy is a key plank of the European Commission’s Capital Markets Union and aims to promote more transparency, simplicity, fairness and cost-efficiency for retail investment products across the internal market.EIOPA strongly supports these objectives. Insurance-Based...

The new EU strategy on adaptation to climate changehighlights the fact that affordability and insurability of natural catastrophes insurance coverage is likely to become an increasing concern. Research shows that in the past only a quarter of the total losses caused by extreme weather and climate...

Digital operational resilience refers to the ability of a financial entity to build, assure and review its operational integrity and reliability.The financial sector has always relied heavily on information and communication technology (ICT) and this reliance grew during the COVID-19 pandemic as...

There is no question that urgent action is required to address climate change and that environmental protection should be integrated into economic growth strategies. In the financial sector, insurance and pension funds have the longest investment time horizons and hence the greatest stake in...

INESE: You have just completed six months at the helm of EIOPA, what has been your focus during this time?Petra Hielkema: I have had a good first half year. It has been easy because my predecessor did a great job. But, at the same time, it has been a rollercoaster because I had to meet with many...

Mrs Hielkema, what impact could the war in the Ukraine have on the insurance industry?The first we did is to assess the direct impact. And here we see that there is very limited impact. The exposure of both insurance as well as the occupational pension sector to Russia, is low. It’s 0.1%. for the...