NAICS vs SIC code for outside North America

Professional Actuarial Topics Property/Casualty
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I’m wondering which industry classification method do US or international insurers generally use as primary classification (and optionally convert to the other one with crosswalk mapping).

I’ve heard an argument that NAICS is NA(US,CA,MX+@?) centric and that SIC should be default if we were to choose one. (That individual might be thinking that SIC is likely to be the original data and if NAICS is available data, it could have been just converted from SIC)

I’m on the other side thinking that even if NAICS is NA classification, the companies, especially US or international insurers might just use more granular NAICS regardless of the insured’s location and convert to less granular SIC if needed.

I’m pretty sure this totally differs by insurers and many might use one or the other, not both.

Also curious to know if NAICS is directly picked by insured/broker or they pick something from dropdown/provide description and underwriter or insurer side picks to NAICS code.

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IIRC, both are used in NA . . . their differences stem from the underlying “taxonomy” structure.

For example, I believe that the NAICS taxonomy focuses more on the underlying general liability exposure/characteristics (insurance-focused) while SIC focuses more on operational structure of the item (not necessarily insurance-focused).

I believe that historically, SIC was used for quite some time, but the NAICS was developed to provide a better “aggregation” structure for determining more appropriate complements of credibility (as an example of why use NAICS vs. SIC).

When I worked in commercial lines (some 15 years ago), I worked with both codes for many of the reports I provided for leadership.

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Thanks, yeah it seems like both are used in NA and US. Is it natural for non-NA entities to be assigned NAICS? (perhaps internally at insurer?) I read EU has their own called NACE. So for US based global insurer pricing EU entities - wonder if they don’t use NACE directly (or if they map NACE to something), would they likely to be using NAICS or SIC?

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Unfortunately, my experience is US-specific; so I’d not be much help with EU or other “overseas” classifications.

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