PCRIC Team Briefs Key Stakeholders on its Product Offerings

The PCRIC Team has recently held a series of bilateral meetings in Suva, Fiji to showcase the current and future products the Company has available to continue its support to building Fiji’s resilience to disasters.

The Team first met the Permanent Secretary responsible for the National Disaster Management Office (NDMO), Mr.  Isoa Talemaibua and senior NDMO officials to brief them on the Tropical Cyclone and Flood/Excess Rainfall parametric insurance policies purchased by the Fijian Government on 1st November 2023.

Mr. Talemaibua thanked the PCRIC Team for designing the products based on the specification requested by the Government of Fiji, and highlighted the importance of the policies given Fiji’s high exposure to natural disaster risks. The PCRIC CEO, Mr. Aholotu Palu, highlighted that the company stands ready to scale up its support to Fiji, both through increasing the coverage of the existing policies and designing new products to cover additional hazards such as drought.

PCRIC is also investing in the design of parametric insurance solutions to cover SOEs and NGOs, and as part of this scoping exercise, the team met with the CEO of Energy Fiji Limited (EFL), Mr. Hasmukh Patel and the EFL management team.

In addition to sharing the technical details of the government’s coverage against tropical cyclone and flood/excess rainfall risks, PCRIC also presented an example policy recently designed for a State Owned Enterprise in the Pacific region, and explained how parametric insurance can provide a solution for the protection of critical assets which are considered uninsurable by traditional insurers. The PCRIC Team highlighted that one of the Company’s core mandates is to build the resilience of Pacific Island Countries against natural disaster risks, and providing protection for the assets of SOEs and key sectors of the economy plays an important part in achieving this goal.

Given the difficulties many SOEs face in insuring their assets through traditional insurance offered by the private sector, PCRIC stands ready to design parametric products for public utilities such as EFL, for the benefit of the Company’s members countries.