•  Secondly, the dynamics of the market place have already resulted in alternative marketing approaches to the traditional agency system, including more cost effective distribution channels like bancassurance. This concept has gained acceptance worldwide for the provision of a wide range of life and pension products via the distribution networks of banks. BIS Review 123/2007  1  •  Thirdly, globalization of the world economy and financial markets, as well as trends towards greater financial innovation and promoting shareholder value, have contributed to a wave of mergers and acquisitions between insurers, banks and asset management companies resulting in the emergence of financial conglomerates. These integrated entities will inevitably raise the bar in the entire business value chain, including product design and pricing, streamlining of distribution channels and integrating valuable databases of customer information, thus accentuating further competitive pressures within the life insurance markets in the region. •  Finally, an area that will present significant opportunities as well as challenges to the insurance industry will be the evolving structure of social security systems and safety nets that will have to keep pace with demographic changes as well as the rising cost of medical care. Many nations are already finding it difficult to provide adequately for the needs of the aging population through state provided social security. It has been reported that globally, life insurance premiums amounted to USD2,200 billion in 2006, and Asia as a region is the fastest growing life insurance market, in line with rapid economic development and growth.

For instance, we sponsor the Consumer Credit Panel, or CCP, a quarterly report on household credit based on a large sample of credit data from Equifax. We have also developed the Survey of Consumer Expectations, or SCE, a monthly survey of consumer expectations about inflation, the labor market and household finance. These reports and summary data are available from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data, which can be accessed on the Bank’s website, newyorkfed.org. Aside from producing these public reports, New York Fed researchers also use the underlying data to do detailed econometric analysis, some of which forms the basis of the blog series you’ll hear about today. In some cases, we are able to link the CCP, SCE and other data sets to derive insights into a wider set of factors affecting workers and consumers, such as educational attainment, student debt burden, job satisfaction, job transitions, access to credit and housing choices—and consumer expectations about many of these factors. Why do we do this? Why is it important to generate insights about individual workers rather than relying just on analysis of the aggregate data? The first, and most obvious, point is that the aggregate masks the experiences of individuals. Not all workers and consumers experience the economy in the same way. Employment, wage and income growth, housing, education, credit and a host of other outcomes vary significantly across different cohorts of individuals and these differences in turn can vary over the business cycle.