Resilience in unprecedented times

Today, Generali presented its financial results for the first half of 2020.

When the year began, no one could imagine we would soon find ourselves dealing with an unprecedented challenge, witnessing a health emergency we had never seen before and we knew nothing about, which shocked the world and hit very hard many of our countries.

Within a few days since the Covid-19 outbreak, we had to completely reinvent our working habits, steer our strategic priorities and come up with new solutions to counter the negative effects of the crisis.         

It was everything but easy, but I am proud of the way Generali reacted to it.

We were there for our customers and all our stakeholders, supporting them and their families promptly and concretely, like a true Lifetime Partner.

Each and every one of us – employees, agents and distributors – understood the challenge and stood up to it, and although we were physically distant, we further strengthened our sense of community.

The work we did together allowed us to weather the storm and ensure Generali’s resilience from a financial and operating standpoint. The results we presented today are a testament to it.

Still, the Covid-19 pandemic is not over yet, and its effects in socio-economic and financial terms will continue to be there for a long time. This means the upcoming months, too, will be very challenging and marked by uncertainty.

We will keep executing our strategic plan, Generali 2021, in a disciplined way like we have done so far, accelerating some initiatives such as the digital transformation, and we will be ready to adapt to a changing environment and capture the opportunities that might arise.

In addition, we will continue to work to support our communities and to play our part in the broader economic recovery effort, as we did in the past months. We promptly set up a 100 million euro international extraordinary fund and we carried out many other initiatives at local level, and more will still need to be done in the months and years to come.        

A lesson we have learnt is that we need to be better prepared to tackle any pandemic or any other systemic crisis that might arise in the future, and I believe we can achieve this only through a joint effort by the public and the private sector.

In this sense, we are proactively liaising with EU institutions, national governments and regulators to launch a pandemic pool, which would be set up together with them and which might help cover, for example, the business interruption-related costs that many SMEs had to bear.  

We are also developing a long-term investment project that shall contribute to the sustainable and green economic development of key European countries where we are present. We want to invest in sectors - such as digital, green mobility, sustainable living - that could both fuel growth and support enterprises which share our same idea of responsible leadership, and we expect to mobilise around 1 billion euro with this project.      

For nearly 190 years, Generali has been at the service of its customers and the community. We are aware and proud of the social role we play, and times like these make us more committed to it and determined to make a real difference.