For those who have been in and around the insurance industry for a while, I think you’ll agree we’ve seen many game-changing events over the years, events where the industry recognized that existing ways of managing risk weren’t going to cut it in the future.
From the asbestos liability crisis in the early 1990s, Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the Northridge earthquake in 1994, or the aftermath of 9/11 in 2001, all situations that had not been seen before, suddenly called on the industry to rethink, regroup, and innovate.
I think a major driver of many insurance careers is the industry spirit that galvanizes together when the convention has been challenged, to bravely say that we need to reexamine what we thought previously, when new data and information come to the fore.
I’m proud of our team at Moody’s; we are surrounded by passionate thought-leaders who have pioneered many (many…!) new approaches to risk analysis and management, and this mission continues to feel exceptionally relevant today.
As the global risk management community joins us here in Florida at Exceedance 2026, you could say that the risk landscape looks chaotic. Perhaps in the past, the risk management community had to deal with regular, singular major events that reshaped the industry.
The difference now is the sheer breadth of risk challenges, the speed at which risks emerge, the unpredictability of both ‘natural’ and increasingly ‘human-made’ risks, and the interconnectedness of risks. Rather than one big event, we have many events in play simultaneously.
For the past few Exceedance conferences, we have published a list of ten emerging risks for the industry to consider. For 2026, we have published a list of ten forces shaping the insurance industry.
We have chosen to focus on forces because we believe insurers will feel pressure from these forces and each will require a response. We could have listed many more.
In the spirit of our conference theme of ‘Rewriting the Playbook,’ each of these forces may represent a rising threat, especially if an insurer doesn’t do anything, but how an insurer responds means that a force could be capitalized on, either by reducing the risk, providing new solutions to policyholders, or perhaps finding new sources of capital to expand the funding pool.
Ten forces
Our '10 Forces' range from nat cat perils taking to the extremes—severe floods, severe heat, and a stubborn baseline of $100 billion in annual losses from ‘secondary perils’ becoming more like primary perils. In addition to cyber-attacks, insurers must now contend with cloud outages and platform failures as a potential loss driver.
For casualty insurers, the list of perils grows and grows, from establishing liability when an autonomous device causes harm to assessing the impact from a slew of court cases against social media companies accused of addictive or harmful product design.
Geopolitics is always on insurers’ minds, but geopolitics is now front and center, shaping business decisions and becoming more structural in nature.
Claims costs continue to outpace ‘regular’ inflation, as construction materials keep rising, and social inflation, such as litigation costs, can be higher than the original claim.
On the brighter side of the 'forces' list, AI offers huge potential to help the industry make sense and manage risk, delivering new solutions that give reassurance and confidence to policyholders in challenging times. The question is: how do insurers select a path to accelerate AI adoption while minimizing risk?
Insurers embrace new technology, and with satellite and aerial imagery now firmly mainstream, how will AI help integrate visuals into their workflows from underwriting, portfolio management, to pre- and post-event analysis?
And finally, with risk modeling increasingly able to include mitigation actions into risk analysis, the proven scientific benefits of using nature-based solutions, from mangroves and salt marshes to managing the vegetation around the perimeter of a house, can be recognized and encouraged through lower premiums and support for nature-based project development.
Our Moody’s data visualization team has produced an explainer of the ’10 Forces Shaping Insurance,’ which is available here.
As I hope you will discover at Exceedance this week, across the Moody’s team, we are working hard to help the insurance industry make sense of this deepening, accelerating risk landscape and to capitalize on the latest technology to get us there.
And as we have seen in the past, when uncertainty strikes or new risks must be addressed, as an industry, we come together to rewrite the risk playbook, ready to face the future and succeed.