Company
ActiveSwiss Re
Zurich · Since 1863
Still independent. After the 1868 fire in Glarus showed that one insurer could not hold a catastrophe, Swiss Re was built to hold it for them.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
Swiss Re was founded in Zurich in 1863, after a fire in Glarus had shown that a local insurer could be wiped out by a single afternoon. Reinsurance was the remedy: a company whose only customers were other insurance companies.
It is still that business. With Munich Re and a few peers, it sits above the policies ordinary people buy and decides, through price, which of those policies can exist. A job that looks like a desk in Zurich is also a decision about a coast.
Same trade, another city
The occupations match Munich Re's: actuaries, natural-scientists, underwriters, and the lawyers of the contract. Swiss Re has also sold services and data to primary insurers, a consulting-shaped business beside the balance sheet. The museum lists both reinsurers because the timeline names both, and because a catalogue that kept only one would imply the trade was a single firm. It is a small club.
Present, and already relevant
Swiss Re is independent. Its reports on insured losses are current documents, not science fiction. The 2050 projection is about the society that has to employ people to move what these models will no longer cover. Swiss Re is one of the firms that writes the models.
The work it organized
- Actuary
- Underwriter
- Natural-catastrophe researcher
- Contract lawyer
On the timeline
Related
- Munich ReActive