The London insurance market must work hard to promote itself in an international landscape that is seeing both globalisation and localisation heighten competition, according to the London Market Group (LMG).
This week, the Group
launched its first ever campaign to promote London as the world’s premier insurance hub, aimed at providing buyers with a “clear case for coming to London” for solutions to the risks they face.
Following the LMG-commissioned London Matters report in 2015, it became clear that, as a market, London was not at the forefront of all global clients’ minds, Andrew Horton, CEO of
Beazley and sponsor of the LMG’s promotional workstream, said.
“When we looked at where we were writing business generally, we were doing well in our traditional core markets, but we weren’t doing as well in the more emerging markets in the world. When we investigated, it was mainly that the new, emerging global markets didn’t know much about the London market,” Horton told Insurance Business.
“The statistics showed that we were just scratching the surface in terms of a lot of the planet, and, as new risks and new insurance markets were arising, we weren’t having much of a part in that, and mainly that was because we were not really known in those places,” he explained.
As well as a “deep history in writing business,” the London market has the “biggest pool of expertise in a very small area compared with any other market on the planet,” Horton said. But it must ensure that it is being seen to keep up with modern risks.
Over the decades – and even centuries – the market has moved with the world, the CEO said.
“We started off with the traditional marine market, and we moved into aviation, into space, into life sciences, into a lot of professional negligence – we’re now one of the biggest writers as a market of cyber insurance, so we move with the times, and we respond to the risks that our insureds are coming across,” he explained.
And while globalisation is changing the face of insurance, a trend for localisation is also increasing competitive pressure.
“While the world is globalising, there are also people who actually want to buy from someone local. Therefore, we need to rise to the challenge of competing with local markets – London isn’t the only market to have developed over the years, those others have continued to develop too,” Horton cautioned.
He added: “We need to advocate for why bringing business into the London market from wherever you are in the world is as good as, if not better, than placing business locally with very strong local market participants.”
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