Rellosa named Asean Insurance Council head

MANILA, Philippines - The chairman of the Philippine Insurers and Reinsurers Association (PIRA) has been named head of the Asean Insurance Council (AIC) during the recent 41st AIC meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Michael F. Rellosa, president of Fortune General Insurance, succeeded Chua Seck Guan, chairman of the Persatuan Insurans Am Malaysia (PIAM) or the General Insurance Association of Malaysia. He will serve a one-year term.

On top of being the new AIC head, Rellosa also chairs the AIC’s Education Committee, a post he has held since last year.

The AIC is facing major challenges as the region enters the period of economic integration and the growing risks from climate change.

“The need to unite and collaborate with each other is felt now more than in any point of AIC’s history. It is my goal to see a more active collaboration among all of us in the region,” he said.

Asean becomes a single economy by January 2016, creating a region with a population of over 600 million and a combined gross domestic product of $2.4 trillion.

“Cities are expanding and people are prospering. We have more at stake – not just in each other’s success, but also in each other’s failure,” he said.

Rellosa noted the region is very vulnerable to natural catastrophes. Extreme weather conditions are not only a bane of agriculture, which remains a major economic activity in Asean, but can also be severely disruptive to global manufacturing and supply chains that keep the region’s factories humming.