Exclusive: Parima appoints three new board members

The Pan-Asia Risk and Insurance Management Association (Parima) has appointed three new board members today, including its first one in Australia.

The total number of board members for the risk management association is now 23, who together represent 13 regions in Asia-Pacific.

Australia’s first Parima representative is Melody Caffin, insurance manager at Techport Australia.

From the Philippines is Susan Valdez, chief corporate services officer at Aboitiz Equity Ventures, who joins the country’s current Parima board member Victoria Tan, head of group risk management at Ayala .

From Malaysia is Suchitra Narayanan, head of risk and insurance at Bumi Armada. Narayanan will be joining forces with existing Malaysia board member Patrick Abdullah, enterprise risk manager at Astro Overseas.

Parima chairman Franck Baron said he was thrilled with the new appointments.

“Parima is developing very strongly and so in certain markets we need to have more than just one board member to address the needs for the local community and the demand for activities,” he told StrategicRISK.

“This is what we did for Malaysia and for the Philippines, because for each country we more than doubled the number of members throughout 2016.”

Parima’s goal is to have board members representing both the insurance and enterprise risk management side of the profession in each region that it operates.

On the expansion in to Australia, Baron said it happened “organically” and was the result of a growing membership base.

“We had no plan for Australia,” Baron said, referring to discussions when Parima was formed three years ago. “But we now have about 40 members here so we have to recognise the fact that we have a decent membership base out of Australia.”

Baron stressed that Parima’s entry in to the country was not about competing with the risk management associations already established there: the Risk Management Institution of Australasia, and the Australian chapter of the US-based Risk and Insurance Management Society.

“We have no intention to compete and we have zero time to do this. This is not the spirit and the DNA of Parima to do that,” he said.

“We cannot provide people here with any specific expertise when it comes to Australia. What we can do is to bring Asia to them. This is exactly what we want to do.”