We maintain an ongoing dialogue with our stakeholders in a variety of ways. Through conferences, roadshows and one-to-one meetings, for example, we stay in contact with representatives of the capital market, rating agencies and private investors. Altogether, we attended 17 investor conferences and 19 roadshows in the year under review, held four webcasted calls (e.g. interim reports) and 15 teleconferences with investors or analysts and hosted visits from a number of investors and analysts. In addition, analysts and institutional investors make the most of our annual Investors' Day and our analysts' conference – also held annually – to engage in an intensive exchange with management. Our employees cultivate the dialogue with our worldwide customers through direct, face-to-face discussions. Furthermore, we regularly measure customer satisfaction with the involvement of external market research institutes. We similarly maintain an ongoing dialogue with political decision-makers, supervisory authorities and insurance industry associations – mostly in relation to topical issues in insurance supervision and financial market regulation in Germany, the European Union and on the wider international level. These include, among other things, the preparations for the Solvency II review process, the development of a global, risk-based group-wide capital standard for insurers and negotiations between the European Union and the United States for a bilateral agreement on prudential insurance and reinsurance measures. In this context we contribute our specialist expertise from business practice to the public debate; in return, we are able to integrate helpful insights gained from such exchanges into our business activities and reporting.

In the interests of transparent communication with our stakeholders we have set ourselves the goal of expanding our reporting on sustainability issues. With the compilation of the present Sustainability Report we already provide annual voluntary reporting on our achievements as a responsible enterprise. In so doing, we are guided by the currently applicable and internationally recognised standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and by the transparency requirements of environmental, social and governance (ESG) rating agencies.

In March 2018 we published our Non-Financial Information Statement for the first time as part of our Annual Report 2017. In so doing, we are in compliance with the new CSR Directive Implementation Act. The statement contains the legally required information regarding key environmental, social and employee matters as well as information on respect for human rights and fighting corruption and bribery.

In 2018, with a view to stepping up our dialogue with stakeholders on sustainability issues and fulfilling the requirements of the CSR Directive Implementation Act, we conducted another stakeholder survey with the participation of representatives from the stakeholder groups of clients, brokers, the capital market, employees, NGOs and public sector workers. We shall report on the resulting findings in the next Sustainability Report.

Further information on our dialogue formats may be found in the section "Product responsibility" under "Customer relations" and in the section "Employees" under "Employee satisfaction".