Today marks ICMIF’s 90th anniversary.
On April, 25, 1922, 12 delegates from five insurance cooperatives met in the offices of the Lega Cooperativa in Rome. Mr Joseph Lemaire, Chief Executive of La Prévoyance Sociale in Belgium, had called the meeting of these cooperatives; all of whom were members of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA). The organisations present were: La Prévoyance Sociale (now P&V Group), Belgium; Folket, and Samarbete (now Folksam), Sweden; La Centrale Arbeiders Verzekerings en Depositobank (now SNS Reaal), Netherlands; Lega Cooperativa insurance office (now Unipol Group), Italy and L’Assurance Ouvrière, France (We cannot find what happened to this organisation so any information or assistance from members on this would be gratefully received).
During the first meeting, the Chair, Joseph Lemaire, made the following resolution “By virtue of the principles of international solidarity brought together at the conference in Rome, the representatives of the cooperative or workers’ life and fire insurance companies resolve to form a study committee which will manage a permanent information service for member societies present and future. The mission of this committee is to give a report at the next conference on the constitution of an International body of workers’ cooperative societies for reinsurance.”
This ‘International body of workers’ cooperative societies for reinsurance’ is the organisation that we know today as the International Cooperative and Mutual Insurance Federation (ICMIF) and the above five organisations were the original members. The original organisation was to be an ‘information service’ for its members with a focus on reinsurance. How appropriate it is therefore that our reinsurance group is meeting next week in Paris at the Meeting of Reinsurance Officials (MORO) with a record number of attendees. The founders would be delighted that reinsurance continues to be central to ICMIF’s work.
As with everything in life we all want to know where we came from. Tom Peters, a management guru, often mentions that you only need to look at the reason an organisation was founded to find its mission and values and these rarely change.
And so to commemorate our 90th birthday we have decided that this year we are developing an online timeline spanning our 90 years of service and collaboration with our members. We’ll share more about this later this year as we are still in the planning stages, but can share with you that the timeline will be interactive and inclusive for all members to both add to and learn from. We hope that you will get involved and also have some fun along the way!
And so to ICMIF today. Never have we been more relevant for the global insurance market. We remain committed and passionate in supporting our member organization’s reinsurance needs. However, we are now so much more than that. We have evolved because of our great relationships with our members and also by having great people working at the Federation.
We can’t possibly list the many invaluable contributions of everyone at ICMIF in this post but we can say that every member of the ICMIF team should be very proud of the work they do.
One example that we would like to share with you is that of Sabbir Patel, our Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President, Development, and his team who have been working incredibly hard to support and help grow Takaful insurance and Microinsurance. What a fantastic mission for ICMIF! Sabbir has been featured twice during the last month in Insurance Day magazine who commended the value of Sabbir’s contribution to the sector and we couldn’t agree more. The articles are below for you to download and enjoy.
Also, our Vice President, Shared Intelligence, Faye Lageu has been invited to work with the United Nations to join an elite working group where she will share her expert knowledge of the use of Corporate Social Responsibility in our sector. This is a huge honour and we are thrilled for Faye who has her first meeting with the UN in June this year.
In our communications team our Vice President of Communications and Head of Digital, Mark McGee, has just submitted his final dissertation, signalling his completion of his Masters Degree in Digital Marketing Communications. Again, this is a huge achievement and one which ICMIF has been benefiting from since Mark started working towards this important goal. And finally we are delighted to report that we have upgraded our ICMIF TV studios and will now offer an even better interview environment for our members when they visit us in Cheshire, UK, and for that we must thank Andy Shaw, Vice President, Technology, for making this possible and on a very small budget.
We hope you will agree that ICMIF, its Secretariat and all our valued members have a lot to celebrate today. We truly have come a long way together.
- Insurance Day Articles (English) (pdf, 3.12 MB)
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