Insurance Center

It has now become official with regard to the AIG giant that it will be continuing as a major element with respect to the Australian insurance market. At the same time they will be keeping what has been known as being their aggressive strategy of moving into new market segments.

Saturday morning CEO Edward Liddy, the US Government-appointed Chairman, in a statement, announced the group’s objective to refocus the company on its basic property and casualty insurance businesses, in order to quickly generate adequate liquidity so as to repay the outstanding balance of its loan from the Federal Reserve Bank and address its capital structure needs and shortfalls.

CEO Liddy says AIG maintains a good number of outstanding businesses with principal market positions and that hold significant competitive advantages that would be very difficult to recreate in today’s negative financial climate.

AIG company’s CEO for Australia, Chris Townsend says that the Liddy statement supports the fact that AIG Australia, is one of these core businesses being a part of the company’s foreign general insurance operations.

Townsend says that the Australian branch is a strong, well-capitalized company that has under its protection in Australia, virtually hundreds of thousands of individual customers and businesses, and says that they have no plans to go anywhere.

Townsend points out the necessity of his company to assure its customers and broker partners that the most recent decisions being made have only further strengthened the company’s desire and its ongoing and continuing promise to underwrite complex risks.

A new Credit Suisse report that AIG Australia may have lost its appetite for aggressively chasing new clients in new market segments, bet despite this, the expectations presented by the company’s spokesman as told insuranceNEWS.com.au today is that the company’s local five-year growth plan will be completely adhered to.

The spokesman stresses the company’s intentions to continue pushing further into the broader market, including the SME market. He system that AIG’s Australia branch hasn't moved away from its growth plans in any way.

Mr. Liddy, in addition to making clear his and the company’s intentions to retain AIG’s US and foreign general insurance businesses, in addition to retaining an ongoing and continuing interest in foreign life insurance operations, said on Saturday that AIG is looking into divestiture opportunities for its remaining high-quality businesses and assets.

Liddy says that the company’s main goal is to emerge from this process as a smaller but more agile company that is solidly profitable and is able to maintain prospects for healthy long-term growth.