AIG regularly communicates with government and regulatory officials regarding the issues that impact our company. We believe this engagement helps us understand and safeguard the interests of our business, clients, employees and shareholders.
During 2021, as in prior years, AIG’s state, federal and international advocacy efforts largely focused on traditional areas of activity and interest within the insurance industry. These include the regulation of insurance product design, pricing and taxation; market conduct; the regulation of underwriting and claims handling and retirement security. We anticipate these traditional industry issues will continue to absorb most of our regulatory monitoring and advocacy efforts.
Climate change is increasingly a focus area for regulators in recent years. In 2021, the trend continued as regulators of several key countries where we operate progressed their climate change initiatives.
Throughout 2021, we engaged with government and regulatory officials to better understand the evolving policy frameworks regarding climate change. These advocacy efforts reflect AIG’s belief that climate risk regulation is necessary, important and inevitable, and that insurers can play an important role in climate adaptation, mitigation and assisting with the transition to a low-carbon economy. Our engagement included providing feedback to policymakers based on our insurance expertise and communicating our position that regulations should be sensible, risk-based and consistent across jurisdictions to avoid a proliferation of competing standards that will overburden organizations and potentially yield an inconsistent impact across insurers. All of our engagement is done in compliance with local regulations, disclosure requirements and reporting requirements.
AIG files quarterly LD2 reports in compliance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act. These reports publicly disclose all our U.S. federal lobbying activities, including all lobbying-related expenses, all issues that the company is currently lobbying and the entities lobbied. Past LD2 reports can be found on the U.S. Senate Lobbying Disclosure Website here.
Similar requirements for lobbying activities exist in non-U.S. jurisdictions. AIG operates in compliance with the local requirements for these non-U.S. activities, including registering on public lobbying registries regardless of whether they are mandatory or voluntary.
On January 13, 2021, AIG suspended its limited Political Action Committee (PAC) activity for the foreseeable future. All political contributions made by the AIG PAC are publicly disclosed and can be found in the Federal Election Commission’s publicly available campaign finance data http://www.fec.gov/. AIG does not make political donations outside the U.S.
For 2021, AIG received a “Trendsetter” designation for our political disclosure and accountability policies and practices for election-related spending in the annual CPA-Zicklin Index published by The Center for Political Accountability and Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. This designation was given to leading U.S. public companies that received a score of 90% or higher on the Index, and AIG received a score of 97.1%.
AIG belongs to various external organizations and associations (Associations) that advocate for or comment on public policies affecting AIG and the insurance sector. These external groups include trade groups and think tanks that participate in public policy discussions in different ways.
During 2021, AIG reviewed a select number of Associations to identify whether there was a misalignment between AIG’s climate risk policies and values and the policies of the Associations to which AIG belongs. AIG concluded that the vast majority of the Associations in which we hold membership are either (a) narrowly focused on a core set of insurance specific topics that do not extend to climate issues, or (b) are constructive participants in public policy discussions around climate risk regulatory developments. We also identified a small subset of Association memberships that have been reproached for their climate risk positions and advocacy efforts by certain climate change advocacy groups. In these instances, AIG’s activities in—and our ability to influence the policy direction of—the Association are limited.
Further details including the methodology behind the review, the disclosure of our Association memberships and the full review results are available on AIG’s corporate website.
Since its launch in 2019, the AIG GTS has gained international recognition as an influential forum for discussion about the changing nature of the global trading system. The GTS is a unique partnership between AIG and some of the world’s leading centers of expertise on global trade from Europe, the US and Asia. It analyzes the challenges facing the rules-based multilateral trade system and explores solutions through a genuinely global lens.
The 2021 GTS was a series of 10 podcasts featuring 25 international trade experts including former EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom and former Acting Deputy US Trade Representative Wendy Cutler. The GTS podcasts have been reaching a growing audience of influential thinkers and decision makers, and key insights from the series have regularly been shared in briefing sessions with policymakers in Washington, D.C., Brussels and Tokyo.
The podcasts continue AIG’s longstanding history of advocacy on trade issues and demonstrate our support for open, rules-based and sustainable trade, which we see as essential to a growing global economy and prosperous, resilient communities. The GTS Podcast Series can be accessed here.
2021 GTS Partners
- Georgetown Institute of International Economic Law (U.S.)
- Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs (U.K.)
- Jacques Delors Institute (France)
- Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (Japan)
- Clingendael Institute (Netherlands)
- Bertelsmann Stiftung (Germany)
- International Chamber of Commerce
