SCOR Brand Guidelines: A 1969 State Reinsurer, Converium, Transamerica Re & Generali US

A state-backed start in Paris.

SCOR began as a French state project. Atlas Magazine, the insurance trade journal, reports that the French state created a new reinsurer on 29 December 1969 and named it the Société Commerciale de Réassurance, shortened to Scor; English Wikipedia gives 1970, its first year of business. The magazine explains the background. The Caisse Centrale de Réassurance, the state reinsurer set up in 1946, had to end the compulsory cessions French insurers paid it, under European rules, and passed its commercial portfolio to the new company, in which it held 48.1 percent at the start. Louis Franck was the first chairman and chief executive.

The first two decades were spent opening offices abroad. According to Atlas Magazine, SCOR opened in Hong Kong in 1972, London in 1973, Dallas in 1974 and Madrid in 1976, then in Mexico City, Bogotá and Sydney, and in 1977 in Tokyo, Singapore, Montreal and Toronto.

Acquisitions followed in the 1980s. In 1988 SCOR took control of Italy’s Vittoria Riassicurazioni, and in 1989 it merged with UAP Re, creating what the magazine calls the country’s largest reinsurer, with UAP holding 41 percent. The purchase of Deutsche Kontinentale Rück followed the same year.

Listing, crisis and recovery.

SCOR was then listed on the Paris stock exchange, Atlas Magazine says, and spent the 1990s building in North America. It took a stake in Commercial Risk Partners in 1992, gaining full control in 1999, and took over the reinsurance business of Allstate in 1996. When UAP sold its 26 percent holding on the market in the mid-1990s, SCOR’s shareholders became a mix of European and American institutions. In 1996 it gathered its Asian business in Singapore under Scor Réassurance Asie Pacifique, and in 2001 it bought Sorema SA and Sorema North America from Groupama and opened a non-life reinsurance company in Dublin, Irish Reinsurance Partners, owned with American investment funds.

The early 2000s were hard. Atlas Magazine lists falling financial markets, weak underwriting results, large-risk claims including the World Trade Center in 2001, and under-reserving for American liability and workers’ compensation business. In November 2002 Denis Kessler, then head of the French insurers’ federation, became chairman and chief executive. French Wikipedia calls the recovery plan “Back on Track”; the magazine describes three capital increases, a shift of underwriting toward Europe and emerging markets and more cautious investments, and says Standard & Poor’s restored an A-range rating in 2005.

Acquisitions resumed. In 2006 SCOR bought Revios, the Cologne life reinsurer that had been Gerling Global Re’s life business, and merged it into SCOR Global Life, Atlas Magazine says. In 2007 it bid for the Swiss reinsurer Converium: after months of resistance, Converium’s board backed an improved offer in May 2007, Insurance Journal reported, and at settlement on 8 August 2007 SCOR held 96.32 percent of the shares. Atlas Magazine says the group was then organised around six hubs: Cologne, London, New York, Paris, Singapore and Zurich. In the United States it bought the mortality business of Transamerica Re, a division of Aegon; the deal was announced on 26 April 2011 and finalised in August 2011, Insurance Journal reported. Generali announced on 1 October 2013 that it had completed the sale of its US life reinsurance companies to SCOR.

How reinsurers present themselves.

Reinsurers sell to insurance companies rather than to the public, so their brands rarely appear on a high street. What they publish instead is aimed at underwriters, brokers, investors and regulators, and the design tends to follow: sober wordmarks, often built on a short name or an acronym, with a restrained palette that has to sit comfortably on a balance sheet as well as on a conference banner.

Much of a reinsurer’s visible output is research. Catastrophe-model maps of windstorm, earthquake and flood zones, risk-science papers, studies of climate and natural catastrophes and reports on life and health trends do the work that advertising does for consumer brands. They show expertise to clients and give the company a reason to be quoted, and their charts, maps and covers become a large part of how the brand is seen.

The rest is disclosure. Listed reinsurers publish annual reports, solvency and financial-condition reports and investor presentations, and they reprint the ratings given by agencies such as Standard & Poor’s and AM Best. These documents are long, dense and built on tables, so a clear grid, a legible text face and consistent figure styles matter more than display type.

Many reinsurers also add a cultural or scientific side. Client seminars and training programmes bring cedants together, and some groups run foundations: Hannover Re’s, set up in 1991, lends contemporary art to a museum in Hanover, while SCOR has run a foundation for science since 2011. For a designer, the lesson is a register of calm authority, in which a well-set report carries more weight than a slogan.

An acronym that outlived its long name.

The acronym stayed as the company changed. English Wikipedia says SCOR became the first French listed company to use “SE,” for Societas Europaea, in its name in 2007, the same year it left the New York Stock Exchange; it trades as SCOR SE on Euronext Paris and is part of the CAC Next 20 index. Its head office stood in Paris La Défense from 1983 to 2012. In September 2019 it completed the purchase of Coriolis Capital, a manager of insurance-linked securities, French Wikipedia says.

Ownership has been contested. In August 2018 the mutual insurer Covéa, already a shareholder with about 8 percent, tried to take control, French Wikipedia says, citing Le Monde and Les Echos; SCOR’s board resisted, years of litigation followed in the commercial and criminal courts, and the two sides signed a settlement ending all proceedings on 10 June 2021.

Leadership has turned over since. French Wikipedia says Laurent Rousseau succeeded Kessler as chief executive in 2021, with Kessler keeping the chair; Thierry Léger became chief executive in early 2023, and Fabrice Brégier became chairman in June 2023. The group works in reinsurance, split between property and casualty and life and health, in specialty insurance and in asset management, English Wikipedia says. It set up the SCOR Corporate Foundation for Science in 2011 to support research and knowledge about risk.

For a design guide, SCOR shows how a four-letter acronym can carry a company from a state creation through a near-collapse and a run of cross-border deals. Compare the Hannover Re and Munich Re guides. For this guide we use a slate blue, a harbour teal and warm paper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SCOR’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.