Lives of Consequence
Alexander S. Kaplan ’01
Senior Client Manager of Global Partnerships, Swiss Re Group
In the public and private sectors, Alexander Kaplan ’01 has worked with government leaders, multi-national business executives and the World Bank on vital issues that span from natural disaster response efforts to national security to financial regulations.
After graduating with a degree in economics, Kaplan helped Congress develop tax legislation as a senior staff assistant to the House Committee on Ways and Means. He later served as government affairs manager at the Organization for International Investment, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit representing the U.S. operations of many leading global companies. There, Kaplan represented foreign-owned companies to ensure non-discriminatory treatment of their U.S. subsidiaries. He returned to the public sector in 2006, joining the U.S. Department of the Treasury as political adviser to Secretary Hank Paulson, before he was hired at Swiss Re Group, a leading wholesale provider of reinsurance, insurance and other insurance-based forms of risk transfer.
Kaplan’s experience in government, business and the non-profit arena provided “a holistic perspective on the policies that shape the country and how they affect our daily lives,” he says. This insight proves critical in his current role as senior vice president of global partnerships at Swiss Re, where he helps governments, international financial institutions and NGOs understand the risks they are exposed to, how to quantify them and how to manage them.
“After the Sumatra earthquake in 2004, one of the deadliest events in history in which more than 200,000 people were killed, the impact on the insurance industry was almost negligible,” Kaplan says. “Swiss Re felt that was failure of the industry and in response created a unit specifically designed to transfer the risk of people around the globe, who otherwise have no economic safety net, away from the government and taxpayers and onto the private market. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past decade.”
Kaplan joined the global partnerships unit in 2011 and has since helped some of the largest financial entities in the world mitigate their risk, which reverberates in public policy, business relationships, the environment and the everyday lives of citizens. For example, they have been working with the World Bank to secure pandemic exposure insurance for the world’s poorest nations, “so they don’t have to wait for wealthy nations to pool resources but rather have a contractually obligated insurance policy to help deal with disaster,” he explains.
Reflecting on his time at HWS, Kaplan says “it’s amazing to me how many courses I took that actually have a part of my day-to-day life today. I took economics and environmental studies because they interested me, and my job now is the perfect amalgamation of all the things I learned at Hobart and William Smith.”
As a student at HWS, Kaplan was president of Chi Phi fraternity, president and founder of Hobartones, and a member of the Colleges Chorale. As an alum, he has participated in the HWS Day on the Hill program, which showcases a variety of public and private sector career options in Washington, D.C., and connects students with volunteers in the HWS Career Network in and around that city.
In the second season of the Emmy Award-winning documentary series “Years of Living Dangerously,” actor Jack Black interviewed Kaplan about the risk, from the insurance industry’s perspective, of climate change in low-lying coastal areas like Miami. Read that story here.