‘No silver bullet’ but Lloyd’s looks to scale innovation to tackle protection gaps
Sir Charles Roxburgh (pictured right), chair of Lloyd’s, has set out a vision for Lloyd’s as a marketplace designed to bring together capital, underwriting expertise and innovation at scale to address some of the world’s biggest protection gaps.
He was speaking at the 2026 BMA Forum, entitled “Charting the Course: Managing Risk and Complexity in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape”, which took place in Bermuda this week. The discussion took place in the form of a Fireside Chat, moderated by Karel Van Hulle (pictured left), member, board of directors for Bermuda Monetary Authority, professor em. KU Leuven and Goethe University Frankfurt, head of insurance and pensions and European Commission.
Van Hulle opened by noting that Lloyd’s is one of the few insurance names recognised far beyond the industry. Roxburgh took that point and used it to explain one of the central pillars of his thinking since becoming chair. In his words, his ambition is to strengthen and extend Lloyd’s position as the “preeminent marketplace for risk”.
For Roxburgh, the real strength of Lloyd’s lies in convening the world’s leading underwriters and creating the conditions in which they can solve difficult problems. He said the market’s newly articulated purpose is to “bring together the world’s leading risk takers to advance global progress”, a formulation that characterises Lloyd’s as an enabling platform.
It is also the lens through which he views the protection gap. Roxburgh described insurance as having “a critical role in providing solutions to the biggest problems facing the world economy and world society”, and suggested that this is deeply embedded in Lloyd’s history. But if the market is to remain relevant, it cannot rely on the achievements of earlier eras. It has to innovate against today’s risks and tomorrow’s.
That innovation, he argued, has to happen at two levels. The first is within the core underwriting businesses that make up the Lloyd’s market. Here, the corporation’s role is not to dictate products or strategies, but to remove barriers that prevent underwriters from innovating.
Roxburgh said a major part of Lloyd’s current strategy is focused on making it easier for the market to work collaboratively at larger scale, whether through larger consortia, bigger line sizes or closer interaction with capital markets to support leading underwriters.
This matters because the risks now facing the market are not small. Roxburgh pointed to new energy infrastructure, defence and security spending, the rising scale of natural peril exposures and the growth of data centres as areas where insurance solutions will need to be much larger, more flexible and more collaborative than in the past. The implication was that incremental product development will not be enough. If Lloyd’s is to help close major protection gaps, it needs to enable innovation at a meaningful scale.
The second level of innovation is through the Lloyd’s Lab, which Roxburgh described as one of the market’s most successful engines of new thinking. Based in the Lloyd’s building, the lab has now supported around 150 start-ups, with the vast majority still trading. Those businesses are not peripheral experiments, in his telling, but part of a broader effort to connect entrepreneurial technology and analytical capabilities with real underwriting and risk management needs.
Roxburgh highlighted several examples, including businesses using satellite imagery, AI and advanced analytics to model coastal erosion and flood risks with greater precision. These tools are valuable not only to insurers but also to communities and public authorities trying to understand how risks are changing. Another example involved the use of sensor technology to improve cargo monitoring and pricing. Across these cases, the common theme was that data and technology are being used to create a more precise understanding of difficult risks and, in turn, more viable insurance solutions.
Roxburgh also described parametric insurance as an increasingly important tool in the broader range of solutions Lloyd’s underwriters can offer. He cited activity in catastrophe-related parametric structures and pointed to new work in areas such as pandemic cover. Parametric insurance, in his view, is not a silver bullet, but it is part of the expanding toolkit that markets like Lloyd’s need if they are to respond to complex and less easily insured risks.
Van Hulle pressed Roxburgh on whether the persistence of the protection gap reflects, at least in part, a lack of imagination from the industry. Roxburgh argued the gap cannot be laid solely at the door of insurers. The problem is not simply one of industry creativity, but of aligning industry, regulation and political leadership around a workable solution. Someone must ultimately pay for risk, and capital must earn a return. Without willingness to pay, even the most innovative products cannot close the gap on their own.
That is why Roxburgh repeatedly returned to the importance of Lloyd’s as a market of markets. Its value lies in concentration of talent, in the willingness of specialist underwriters to tackle difficult risks, and in the flexibility of a marketplace structure that can assemble different forms of capital and expertise around emerging needs. The market can help create solutions, but it needs the surrounding ecosystem to support them.
In that sense, his message was both ambitious and measured. Lloyd’s sees itself as a convening platform for innovation and risk-taking, not a solitary answer to the world’s resilience problems. But if the challenge is to build meaningful insurance solutions for climate, infrastructure and systemic risks, Roxburgh made clear that Lloyd’s wants to be at the centre of that effort.
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