Standing Out In the Crowd.

Insurers assemble elaborate exhibits, volunteer their leading executives to speak, and network like crazy at the annual RIMS conference. The goal: to parlay their efforts into sales.

There's a mystique about the Risk and Insurance Management Society's annual conference and exhibition that inspires awe in the voices of those who speak about it. Some say it's the largest gathering of insurance professionals in the world. Others describe the exchange of ideas and the tremendous energy the conference has. John Ryan, vice president of commercial marketing, Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., Boston, perhaps said it best: "Anybody who wants to be a player in the risk-management marketplace is going to be there."

At the 38th annual conference, scheduled for April 30 through May 5 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, more than 10,000 people who want to be players are expected to be there. They'll include risk managers, insurance carriers, brokers, vendors and other insurance professionals. They'll stay at 32 hotels and be invited to more than 400 exhibits and more than 160 educational sessions. And they'll have access to each other.

"Insurers like to be there because all of their customers are there," said Roger Andrews, the society's first vice president and general counsel and director of risk management at E.D. Bullard Co., Provo, Utah. "The brokers like to be there because they don't want the customers talking directly to the insurers without them involved."

Glass Is in Session

The RIMS conference is noted for how well its educational sessions are attended, Andrews said. "A lot of conferences in places like New Orleans or San Diego have to compete with the golf courses and everything else, but RIMS has a good reputation for keeping people involved in education," he said.

This year, as the organization celebrates its 50th anniversary, the conference theme is "Building a Stronger Future from a Rich Past." Many of the Sessions are forward-looking in the skills they will teach. Enterprise financial risk management, for example, has become a more prominent educational theme, Andrews said.

Also, more sessions involve general risk solutions instead of technical insurance concerns, said John Roskopf, vice president of Aon Corp. and managing director of Aon University, chicago. Topics such as safety, loss control and merger-and-acquisition due diligence are more common, he said. Topics for the 2000 conference were selected by the programming committee from more than 1,100 entries based on timeliness, relevance and quality, according to RIMS. In addition to the core educational sessions, more than 30 industry-specific sessions should attract risk managers with similar challenges. Placing great importance on the educational sessions, Aon will have speakers at about six of them this year, Roskopf said.

"I'll" speak at one or two sessions and attend as many as I can, because I'm certain I will pick up two or three fabulous ideas," he said. Aon will host a brunch for college students to discuss the latest developments and job opportunities in the industry.

Marsh Inc., New York, will send speakers to several sessions and will host a breakfast for clients and potential clients. Last year, 750 people attended the breakfast, spokesman Tom Elliott said. It's a premier forum for discussing advanced concepts in risk management and risk financing, he said. Marsh places such importance on the RIMS conference that two years ago, John T. Sinnott, chairman and chief executive officer of risk and insurance services, spoke on one of the panels, Elliott said.

Patrick G. Ryan, Aon chairman and CEO, is also a frequent RIMS conference participant. "He's even stood in the booth and done booth duty," Roskopf said. In total, Aon will send about 100 people, including speakers, exhibit personnel and others, to this year's conference, he said.

Liberty Mutual will host 13 educational sessions at the conference. "It gives us great visibility," Ryan said.

RIMS' increased emphasis on education has been a major change in the society's evolution, said Susan Meltzer, RIMS president and assistant vice president of Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada.

"When I joined 17 years ago, the major focus was on lobbying and legislative issues," Meltzer said. "Now the main demands from our members are for education." Members have encouraged RIMS to focus on formal education and on the informal exchange of information and knowledge.

Informal Education

A dynamic exchange of ideas and information goes on outside the sessions as well. "As a broker, sometimes the best thing you can do for a client is put that client in touch with other risk managers who have similar issues," Roskopf said. "Insurance isn't the solution for all risk-management problems."

RIMS is a networker's dream. At other times of the year, a client may want to meet an underwriter, but the logistics are too difficult. "If a client is thinking about a captive and has some domicile issues, we can get them together in one day with representatives of five or six major captive domiciles," Roskopf said. "They can talk about advantages, disadvantages, how they might want to structure their program." For the past few years, Aon has furnished its exhibit booth with couches, tables and chairs so people can talk comfortably.

"In an age of electronic communication, nothing beats meeting people face to face," Roskopf said.

Meeting each other face to face brings some people to RIMS. "Some people don't register for the conference, but they come for the week because of all the activities and the opportunities to see people they need to see," Andrews said. "It's a small number, but it goes on."

For almost everyone, the conference is a great opportunity to meet leaders in the industry and talk with colleagues and customers. Networking takes place everywhere--during coffee breaks, over dinner, in the hallways. "I look forward every year to seeing people I haven't seen," Liberty Mutual's Ryan said.

Show of Shows

A favorite gathering place is the exhibit hall, where the exhibits have evolved from small, tabletop displays to a sophisticated trade show. Liberty Mutual was one of the first companies to participate in the exhibitions, and its exhibit has been named "best in show" for the past six years, Ryan said. Liberty Mutual makes its exhibits creative to project the image of a company that is creative in meeting the needs of its customers and "thinks outside the box," he said.

For the 1997 conference in Atlanta, Liberty Mutual had sand sculptors recreate buildings from around the world, including the Eiffel Tower and the Opera House in Sydney, Australia, Ryan said. The display used 16 tons of sand and took up most of a 20-foot-by-60-foot booth. "We were conveying the idea that we were a global company then with our international expansion," Ryan said.

Liberty Mutual measures the results it gets from traffic in the booth. Ryan said his goals for the exhibit are to make sure that everybody at the conference knows Liberty Mutual is there and that qualified and interested buyers visit the booth.

Leveraging the Booth

HNC Insurance Solutions, an Irvine, Claif.-based provider of predictive software to the insurance industry, has had an exhibit at the conference for 10 years. This year the company plans to go beyond the booth by sponsoring a reception and introducing several new products, said Diane Altwies, assistant vice president of field marketing.

HNC Insurance's products are proprietary software technologies that help insurance companies, self-insured companies, managed-care companies and third-party administrators manage risks. The company's predictive technology analyzes patterns in historical behavior to predict outcomes in areas such as detecting fraud and estimating workers' compensation claim loss reserves.

"We started at RIMS with a pop-up booth, and now we have a 20-by-20 space," Altwies said. "HNC wants to leverage the good attendance there to tell our audience where we're going and what we're doing."

The Secret Ingredient

Just as there's no way to determine for certain the conference's biggest drawing card, there's no way to determine for sure what kind of participation--education, networking or exhibits--brings the biggest return. "It's like a secret ingredient or formula," Ryan said. "If you do them all right, then you make yourself a bigger presence. If you were to do only one, I'm not sure it works as well. It's a total package."

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Promoting Quality From the Inside Out

As the Risk and Insurance Management Society Inc. celebrates its 50th anniversary; it continues to be challenged by the need to promote quality in the industry. Its approach to the challenge in the coming year will be more internally focused, said Roger Andrews, general counsel and director of risk management, E.D. Bullard Co., Provo, Utah, and the society's first vice president. Andrews will be installed as RIMS president at the annual conference and exhibition in San Francisco, April 30 to May 5.

This year, RIMS will assume full sponsorship of the Quality Scorecard, first issued in conjunction with the Quality Insurance Congress in 1998 and repeated in 1999. The scorecard allows risk managers to rate the service and products of insurers, brokers and third-party administrators. The Quality Insurance Congress, which was initiated by the insurance industry ran into financial and other difficulties, and disbanded last year, Andrews said. RIMS has created a new Quality Committee, which will continue to promote quality and issue another scorecard, although the scorecard probably will not be issued this year.

The 1999 scorecard elicited a large response, but the insurance industry "received a D at best," Andrews said. Although its mandates have not been written yet, the new committee will probably focus internally, examining the way risk managers do their jobs as much as the way insurers and brokers do their jobs, Andrews said. "If risk managers are doing their jobs, they'll be demanding quality from providers," he said. "If we can educate risk managers on what they need to do, it will raise quality in the industry."

The committee will have its first meeting at the conference, he said.

Shaky Skeleton

The society is also challenged after 50 years by its internal structure, Andrews said. A lot of companies today want risk management outsourced. "A risk manager could be on the payroll one day, and the next day he's doing the same thing for the same company, but he's no longer an employee," he said.

Under RIMS' current rules, companies, not individual risk managers, are members of the organization. Consequently, a risk manager who is not employed by a specific company or who provides services to more than one company cannot be a full member. "We're losing membership," Andrews said.

The growing trend of mergers and consolidations is also a threat to RIMS membership. "When you have two members who belong to different companies and the companies become one, you lose a member," Andrews said. Issues of RIMS' internal structure will be addressed at the annual conference and during the coming year, he said.

From a Rich Past

The Risk and Insurance Management Society Inc. represents more than 4,000 industrial, service, nonprofit, charitable and governmental entities. It serves more than 7,500 individuals representing its member companies and organizations in 88 chapters across the United States and Canada. But in 1932, it was merely an idea discussed at a dinner party at the Governor Clinton Hotel and Restaurant in New York.

That idea grew into the Insurance Buyers of New York, which in 1935 seceded from its parent, the American Management Association, and became the Risk Research Institute. The institute counted among its accomplishments New York's adoption of the Multiple Lines Underwriting Bill and the defeat of a proposal that would have placed all workers' compensation in New York State under a state insurance fund.

By the end of the 1940s, the need for a national organization representing the needs of the buyers became clear.

* Nov. 21, 1950: The National Insurance Buyers Association was incorporated as a nonprofit organization. Its goals included securing simpler and more adequate policy forms, insurance protection for all insurable risks and adjustments of inequities in rates.

* Oct. 5, 1955: National Insurance Buyers Association formally changed its name to the American Society of Insurance Managers. The society now included Canadians.

* September 1956: The society sponsored the first Risk Management Institute, a three-day course at the University of Connecticut.

* 1958: ASIM's first education committee was formed.

* 1959: The society had 23 chapters and almost 1,000 members.

* 1960s: ASIM formed a legislative committee and for the first time was allowed to participate in the deliberations of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

* Feb. 20-22, 1963: The society's first national conference was held in New Orleans. Four hundred insurance industry professionals attended.

* 1970s: The society worked to help launch risk-management groups in other countries, including Mexico, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France.

* 1972: The annual conference, held in Montreal, grew to 1,400 registrants, including people from England, France, Belgium, Mexico and Zambia.

* 1973: The Associate in Risk Management program was developed.

* Jan. 1, 1975: The American Society of Insurance Managers became the Risk and Insurance Management Society and adopted a new logo, the RIMS unicorn.

* 1979: RIMS members totaled 3,000 with 61 chapters.

* 1980s: RIMS was involved in drafting Vermont's captive law and in supporting the Products Liability Act of 1981.

* 1988: Registrants at the annual conference in Washington, D.C., grew to 4,000.

* 1990s: RIMS introduced Quality Scorecard; Quality Toolkit; Biannual Compensation & Benefits Survey; RIMS Benchmark Survey, which studies cost of risk; Risk Management Glossary; and Certificates of Insurance Manual.