Interviews & contributions

The Coronavirus outbreak has created a huge disruption globally. What does this mean for the insurance and pensions sector in Europe?Without doubt this is a challenging time for business and for people not just in Europe but around the world. Companies have had to radically adjust their business...

​Interview with Justin Wray, Deputy Head of the Policy Department of EIOPA, conducted by Evgenia Tzortzi for Kathimerini.

EIOPA has identified cyber, including silent cyber, aggregation as a key risk. What must the (re)insurance sector do to ensure it can to write this risk prudently and effectively – and how might governments or government agencies help, for example, through the provision of data?The issue of...

He has been called ”Insurance tsar”. The 53-year Portuguese Gabriel Bernardino has led the European supervisory authority for insurance and occupational pensions, EIOPA, since its creation in 2011. Prior to that, he was Chairman of the predecessor Committee of European Insurance and Occupational...

In your 2017 oversight report you tracked down all the supervisory activities you had done that year. How does EIOPA evaluate itself in terms of efficiency of its actions?We are not only looking to the activities per se, but also what did it bring to the European consumer. If you look at it from...

EIOPA published recently the first paper of a series on systemic risk and macroprudential policy in the insurance sector. What are the lessons learnt from the financial crisis and the banking sector affecting the European insurance sector?Although the insurance sector differs substantially from...

Key objectives of the stress test exercise Mr Bernardino, today EIOPA published the results of its fourth Insurance Stress Test. What are the key objectives?The key objectives of this year’s stress test is to assess the resilience of insurance groups throughout Europe to a set of severe but...

Insurers struggle with the combination of capital requirements and low interest rates. “Interest rates could remain low for years”, thinks Gabriel Bernardino, who is Chairman of EIOPA, their European regulator. Pension funds tend to like EIOPA, because it is less strict on interest rates than the...

What are the main challenges for national pensions systems?Pension systems, including national pensions systems, face severe challenges of an ageing population. For example, by 2020, one quarter of Europeans will be older than 60. While population ageing accelerates, population growth is slowing...