Keeping pace with risk
The industry likes to divide risk into categories, but risk itself is becoming considerably less cooperative. Cyber risk can become an operational problem; geopolitics can disrupt supply chains; extreme weather can expose vulnerabilities far beyond physical damage and AI is creating both new efficiencies and new liabilities at a pace businesses are still trying to understand.
For Lindsay Roos, CEO of Bowring Marsh Bermuda, that interconnectedness is exposing a gap between how businesses traditionally organise risk and how disruption increasingly travels through an organisation.
“The biggest disconnect we are seeing is between what businesses think resilience looks like and what is actually required to deliver it,” Roos told Bermuda:Re+ILS.
“Too often, risk is still viewed in silos – cyber, supply chain, geopolitics, people, climate – when in reality those exposures are increasingly interconnected and can cascade across the organisation.”
That presents a challenge for an insurance industry accustomed to defining, separating and pricing individual exposures. But it also creates an opportunity for brokers, insurers and markets capable of looking across those boundaries and constructing solutions around the way clients’ risks actually behave.
Breaking down the silos
The forces behind that change are not difficult to identify. Roos pointed to faster-moving geopolitical volatility, more frequent extreme weather, inflationary pressures and rapid technological development, particularly around AI.
What matters is how those forces interact: “The organisations pulling ahead are the ones treating resilience as a strategic capability, not just an insurance or compliance issue,” she said.
That shift is changing the conversation between buyers and their brokers. Five years ago, discussions were much more likely to centre on coverage and cost, Roos said. Those considerations have not disappeared, but buyers are now asking broader questions about resilience, data and interconnected exposures.
“They are also looking for partners who can help them anticipate what is coming next, not just react to what has already happened,” she said.
At the same time, changing market conditions are giving clients greater scope to reconsider how they transfer risk.
“Over the past 12 months, the biggest shift has been in how market conditions are changing the way we think about solutions for clients. When traditional insurance becomes more commoditised and pricing flattens, clients naturally look for alternatives – whether that is captives, parametric solutions or structured reinsurance.
“That has pushed us to think beyond placement and more toward portfolio optimisation. Our role is increasingly about helping clients ask the right question, not simply where should I place this risk, but what is the most effective risk transfer structure for this exposure at today’s prices?” she said.
Beyond cheaper insurance
That distinction becomes particularly important as parts of the market soften.
A more competitive market inevitably creates opportunities to improve pricing, but Roos argues the broker’s value cannot stop at securing a cheaper renewal. Greater choice should create an opportunity to examine the programme itself: what a company transfers, what it retains and whether different structures could produce a better result.
“In a softer market, the broker’s role becomes even more important – but it shifts from driving price alone to driving better outcomes,” she said.
That requires “better programme design, clarity around where to retain or transfer risk, stronger use of data and analytics”, alongside support in navigating areas such as cyber, supply chain, people and climate.
Technology is becoming part of that process. Roos sees genuine value in AI not simply where it automates existing tasks, but where it improves the quality and speed of decision-making. “The biggest impact is in turning data into insight: identifying patterns in risk exposure, improving portfolio and programme design, spotting supply-chain or operational vulnerabilities earlier and helping clients understand trade-offs more clearly,” she said.
That ability to see connections earlier becomes more valuable as the risks themselves become more connected.
Bermuda’s next test
For Bermuda, this changing environment plays directly to many of the characteristics on which the market has been built. Roos points to the island’s flexible regulatory environment, concentration of reinsurance expertise, access to capital and proximity to decision-makers. Its stability through multiple market cycles and claims-paying record have also created confidence among clients and counterparties.
But perhaps more important to the next phase is Bermuda’s history of tackling risks that do not fit comfortably elsewhere. “Bermuda has always been at its best when writing hard-to-place risks with creativity,” Roos said.
That capability should matter in a world where the boundaries between risks are becoming less distinct. If clients increasingly require structures that combine different forms of risk transfer, respond to emerging exposures or address risks for which established products remain immature, Bermuda has many of the ingredients required to build them.
Roos nevertheless sees an area where the island must continue to evolve: “Speed to innovate on alternative structures, speed to integrate with global digital platforms and speed to respond to emerging risks such as AI liability.”
Speed has long been part of Bermuda’s proposition. The ability to bring expertise, capital and decision-makers together has allowed the island to respond when new risks or capacity shortages created opportunities.
But the benchmark is changing. Speed today is not only about forming capital or creating a structure when the market turns. It is increasingly about how quickly the industry can identify changing exposures, use data to understand them and translate that understanding into solutions.
The island already possesses much of what it needs: “Bermuda has the talent and the regulatory environment. The next step is ensuring the island has the same operational agility that the market now expects.”
For a market that has repeatedly prospered by solving problems others found difficult, the opportunity is familiar. The difference is the pace at which the problems are now arriving.
Read the full Bermuda:Re+ILS Annual 2026 here.
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