More than a decade ago, when I was running AON Risk Solutions in EMEA, I remember being at an internal event with the head of AON’s Irish business and discussing how we’d both got into insurance. His explanation has stayed with me: “My father didn’t know anyone at the bank.”

To me, that sums up the image people had of insurance when I joined the industry. It was the forgotten poor relation of financial services – the place people went to work when they didn’t have a contact at the bank. 

But that’s not how people look at insurance these days, for one very simple reason. It’s a business that has proved its resilience against all sorts of shocks – and thrived. Back in 2000, the global non-life insurance market was estimated to be worth around US$940 billion. By 2021, global non-life premiums had reached an estimated US$3.86 trillion. Today, talented people want to work in insurance because they can see how essential it is to people’s daily lives and their businesses, wherever they are. 

The biggest lesson the last few years have taught us is that the world is full of risks. Extreme weather events that ought to happen once or twice a century are happening almost every year, and they’re on a much bigger scale than we’ve seen before. A 2022 study by scientists at Dartmouth College found that, between 1992 and 2013, extreme heat caused between US$5 trillion and US$29.3 trillion in global economic losses. 

The business climate has changed as well. We all got a shock coming out of the pandemic, when we realised there was a lot more risk in global supply chains than anybody had spotted. Nowadays, if a container ship runs aground in the wrong place, 400 others have to wait days for it to be refloated. Billions of dollars worth of international trade can quickly become stranded. 

We can all see that the world is complex and risky, and if anything it’s getting more so – but at the same time, we know we can’t just ignore risk. We have to deal with it, which means people will always need ways to protect themselves. 

Think about how much more technology goes into every product we use than just a few years ago. If I’m a carmaker, the complexity that can crop up in my cars today is way higher than it was 20 years ago, and they’re way more complex to manufacture. I listened to a recent podcast with Elon Musk where he was articulating how the design of an electric car is relatively simple, compared to designing, from scratch, all the machines with which to set up a production line to build it. Insurance against those risks is more important for manufacturers than ever. 

Insurance is a great industry, one that I’ve been involved in for 30 years as an underwriter, a broker, a senior executive and now in insurance services. At Charles Taylor we are proud to play our part, alongside the insurers that bring the capital to shoulder people’s risks and the brokers that represent the risk transfer accurately to the customers. 

This is an industry that works best when we remember what we’re all here to do: help people protect themselves, and when things go wrong, help them fix it, get back on their feet and move on. That’s a message that resonates especially strongly for me now, because one of our main jobs at Charles Taylor is to be there to help people at the moments when trouble strikes and they need to call on their insurance cover. So we end up being the people who help to fulfil the promises that insurers make. 

Playing that role takes people with all sorts of skills. And it’s a job that is always going to be needed – as long as there is risk, there’ll be insurance. This is an industry with a long history and an even longer future. It’s also a people-based industry, and I’m proud to say that Irish colleague remains a great friend and is one of the nicest, smartest and wittiest people I know. So if you don’t know anyone at the bank, don’t worry.
 

Rob Brown
Group Chief Executive Officer