In his short speech, Don Alfredo thanked German risk managers for their support and announced that the Cologne staff would soon be moving to much bigger offices, in order to cope with the strong growth both of business and employee numbers.

But Mr Honisch had more than popular criticism of rating agencies in store.

He minced no words when expressing risk managers' demands on insurers. They had started offering business interruption coverage without preceding property damage, true. "But the conditions and wordings can only be seen as a prototype," Mr Honisch complained.

"Losses from business interruption already today have a bigger impact on the value chain than the pure property damages," he explained to more than 100 risk managers, brokers, reinsurers and Mapfre managers in the Bel Etage of Cologne's Chocolate Museum.

Mr Honisch contributed a personal experience. "Last spring I ordered a new company car which should have been delivered in early summer," he said.

"Because I am also getting older and my neck is not as flexible anymore, I ordered a back-view camera." The problem was that one part within that camera came from Japan, hit at that time by the earthquake and tsunami. "As a result, my car was delivered almost 2 months later than originally planned."

Mr Honisch believes that the situation in Errors and Omissions (E&O) cover is similar. "The need for such policies is constantly growing, as the importance of services within our economy is becoming bigger and bigger." But limits and scope of coverage offered by insurers are still 'timid', Mr Honisch said.

"I fail to understand that insurers need large amounts of information from the respective client in order to properly estimate the risk," he said. "We at Bertelsmann are happy to provide you with that information. But first of all insurers need the right know-how to be able to work with the information provided," added the DVS committee member.

Those insurers who were afraid of entering this comparatively new field of activity should take a look at the development of D&O in Germany, Mr Honisch said. "This line of business was seen as very dangerous 15 years ago. In the meantime we have seen that the insurance industry can earn good money with it," he added.

Mr Honisch referred to 'our industry' when talking about insurers, alluding to the fact that he used to work for German industrial insurer Gerling, but also to the general feeling in the German risk management community that they and their market counterparts somehow form one industry.

And this industry has problems in his view. "Our industry should make a bigger effort to move on," he said. "We can achieve a much more important position within the value chain, if we want to."

Mr Honisch believes that the very role of insurance within that value-chain of corporate business is at stake because industrial insurers are disconnecting from the rest of the economy.

"Does industrial insurance have the ability to keep pace with a constantly changing environment?" he asked. Or is the widening distance of insurers from trends at their customers' end leading to a point where insurance coverage is not regarded as important any longer from a corporate point of view?

The moment a large claim occurrs, nobody within a corporate enterprise questions the need for traditional risk transfer. "But the general trend is that the claim frequency achieves historic lows," Mr Honisch said. Thus, insurance is no longer in the focus, he said.

The risk manager pleaded with insurers to change their general approach. "The condition for success is know-how," he said. "This includes, of course, the know-how of the limits of insurance." Nobody would ever expect coverage for computer viruses with high limits. "This cannot be managed as a virus can affect almost all computers at the same time, worldwide," he conceded.

But other steps such as a proper indirect business interruption policy and better E&O would be a start according to Mr Honisch. To help with this, insurers have to acquire the necessary know-how by investing in people like underwriters, claims and account managers. "But the main investment stream does not go into people and know-how in our industry. It goes into sales," he said.

The choice is simple, according to the risk manager. An industry with know-how would sell. But an industry with a lot of sales people without the know-how would not sell, he concluded.

Please sign up here to our full-time mailing list to ensure that you receive our weekly newsletter.

• More Insurance News