Swire Blanch, the international re-insurance broker 50 per cent owned by Swire Fraser, has set up a Hong Kong office to further bolster its presence in the region and capture a slice of Hong Kong's insurance market.
The company, which is also 50 per cent owned by EW Blanch, the largest quoted re-insurance intermediary in the US, will work with Swire Insurance Brokers to target clients looking for wider access to the world re-insurance markets.
Chief executive Garth Bearman said the office would be headed by Lawrence Liao Xiaoju, and report to Blanch's regional base in Singapore.
Hong Kong also was growing in importance in its own right, he added, requiring the group to build a presence. Mr Bearman said Hong Kong had the highest number of insurance companies per capita in the world, and that increasingly diverse types of insurance were emerging from the territory.
Insurance companies were looking to brokers to do more than just produce and place re-insurance, but also provide re-insurance related services, such as outsourcing re-insurance needs or catastrophe modelling.
Swire Fraser development and marketing director David Seelsaid by 2000 the Far East as a whole would account for a third of worldwide insurance premiums.