GCC insurance industry requires regulatory ‘passporting’

The conveners of the longest running Insurance platform for the Middle East - the Middle East Insurance Forum (MEIF) - announced that a groundbreaking report on the region’s insurance industry will be launched exclusively at MEIF 2016. 

This was revealed by Middle East Global Advisors, an intelligence platform serving markets in the Middle East North Africa Southeast Asia (MENASEA) region alone with Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) during a press conference held to share some of the insights of the much-awaited “Finance Forward Insurance Outlook Report 2016”.

Abdul Rahman Mohammed Al Baker, Executive Director of Financial Institutions Supervision at the CBB, said: “We are delighted to announce that the 12th annual MEIF will serve a launching platform for such an important industry report.”

Conveying some of the results from the report’s survey,  Vice-Chairman and CEO, Middle East Global Advisors, Dr. Sayd Farook said, “Budget cuts impacting infrastructure spending across the Middle East constitute a major concern for many survey participants, especially given that commercial lines have been buoyed by large projects.  In 2014, growth in commercial lines grew just 6.6 per cent (compared to 19.6pc for personal lines) which may account for survey respondents’ more optimistic outlook for medium-term premium growth in personal lines.”

Al Baker indicated: “The Middle East insurance industry has grown considerably; however, it still lags behind other emerging and frontier markets in the overall penetration. Instead of encouraging competition between insurance companies and takaful operators for a share of a small market, we need the entire sector to find strategies to make the market grow more rapidly to support consolidation and create a more robust capital base.”

MEIF 2016 will take place on the 2nd and 3rd of February at the Gulf Hotel in Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain. The “Finance Forward Insurance Outlook Report 2016” will be launched at the forum.