Risk management strategy of insurance companies and global financial crisis. A study focusing on insurance companies globally and in Greece

Abstract

Insurance companies are financial organizations that their core businesses are about dealing with their clients’ risks, as well as their own risks in a daily basis. Namely, effective risk management is the core business of insurance companies in order to preserve a satisfactory financial performance and be able to survive after risk compensations. Even though the concept of risk management has its’ roots in insurance companies, and the reason of existence of insurance companies is undertaking, through insurance contracts, their clients’ risks with a risk related premium in exchange, nevertheless, it is very interesting the fact that the global financial crisis revealed that many of those companies had inefficient risk management strategy that led them to bankruptcy.

The goal of this postgraduate dissertation is to examine how the global financial crisis affected insurance companies globally and in Greece, and primarily to examine and to reveal the vulnerabilities of insurance risk management strategies before and during the crisis that led some insurance companies to fail to protect their profitability and their customers’ value by going bankrupt. Furthermore, 106 questionnaires were collected from top executives in the risk management sector, in order to be conducted an econometric analysis of the determinants that define the level of effective risk management strategy of insurance companies in Greece. For this purpose, was used the statistical package of social sciences (SPSS) and available space on web server for developing the website questionnaire on Google Forms.