The insurance sector covers a very wide range of activities. From a technical standpoint, it encompasses areas that touch many aspects of everyday life, such as property and casualty insurance (e.g., home multi-risk, natural disasters), civil liability (e.g., automobile), health or personal protection, as well as retirement and savings. From a client standpoint, policyholders include individuals, professionals, small businesses, and large corporations (fleets, industrial risks, group insurance, etc.). From a commercial standpoint, the sector relies on highly diverse intermediaries: in-house networks, tied agents, brokers, and various service providers.

This diversity is also reflected in the legal forms of the entities providing coverage: joint-stock companies remunerating shareholders, mutual insurance companies governed by the Insurance Code, provident institutions under the Social Security Code, or “Mutuelles 45” governed by the Mutuality Code. Some are highly specialised, while others are broadly diversified — whether in terms of activities, geographical scope, or customer segments.

The diversity of activities and actors reflects the importance of insurance mechanisms in the functioning of industrial and post-industrial societies as tools for managing the risks they generate. Present in both public and private insurance systems, these mechanisms have traditionally been guided by principles of solidarity and various pooling techniques. In recent years, however, insurance appears to be undergoing profound transformations due to evolving economic activities leading to the emergence of new risks, as well as the maturation of technologies that challenge long-standing solidarity principles and pooling techniques.

The emergence of new risks can be observed at two levels:

• At the macroeconomic — even planetary — level: where Ulrich Beck described in the 1980s and 1990s “risk societies,” in which risk becomes omnipresent, academic literature now interprets the current era as the Anthropocene (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007; Schuilenburg and Peeters 2017). The globalisation of climate and environmental risks goes hand in hand with recognition of the difficulty of mitigating them (Bovari, Giraud, and Mc Isaac 2018).
• At the microeconomic level, the digital revolution of recent decades has transformed behaviours and social interactions. Driven by technology, the sharing economy places usage at the centre of exchanges and challenges the central role of ownership, a key notion of classical capitalism. It also introduces new risks linked to technology itself, such as cyber risk.

Big data technologies, which enable both mass data collection and processing through increasingly powerful algorithms, have further reshaped the insurance landscape. With increasingly granular information, it is now possible to apply statistical models at the individual level, a practice unimaginable in earlier periods.

Objectives

• Promote reflection, research, and innovation in the field of risk and uncertainty assessment and management in the context of emerging big data techniques — a topic of broad societal interest.
• Increase and consolidate the partners’ level of excellence by organising international-scale activities in reflection, research, and training; facilitate direct contact between GENES and FNSP researchers, PhD students involved in research activities, CCR, MGEN, Thélem Assurances, GROUPAMA, and the IEF Foundation.
• Create opportunities for joint research and training activities between the Parties and their partners in the Applied Research Programme.
• Develop partnerships with centres of academic excellence in areas relevant to CCR, MGEN, GROUPAMA, Thélem Assurances, and the IEF Foundation.

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