An Australian manufacturer can usually tell you what a flood would do to its factory. Far fewer could say what would happen if a rail line on the other side of the country washed away.
Emma Loynes, chief executive for Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa at Lloyd’s, built Tuesday morning’s keynote at the NIBA Convention on the Gold Coast around that gap. Risks now connect and compound, she told brokers, so advice built only around what a client owns is likely to miss much of what could hurt them.
“Risk doesn’t sit neatly in separate boxes anymore,” she said. “As risk becomes more connected, the value of connection becomes even greater.”
Brokers should be asking what a business depends on, where its weak links are and what would happen if one failed, she said, rather than stopping at where the assets are.
For a large company, that might mean a specialist supplier overseas, a port, a transport operator, an energy provider and a cloud platform. Loynes said smaller businesses face the same problem – only with less room to absorb it. An SME might rely on a single supplier, cloud platform, key customer and premises, and the failure of any one of them can stop it trading almost straight away.
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Her main example was close to home. In early 2022, flooding in outback South Australia damaged a long stretch of the Trans-Australian Railway and cut the freight link between Perth and the eastern states for more than three weeks. According to Main Roads Western Australia, the line carries about 80% of the freight coming into WA from the rest of the country.
The effects reached well beyond the track. Coles and Woolworths limited purchases of staples such as pasta, rice and flour for WA shoppers, and government, rail operators, retailers and freight companies worked together to keep supplies moving. Temporary permits allowed triple road trains to travel further than normal, and a road-rail “land bridge” moved containers around the closure. Main Roads says road freight rose by about 50% under those permits.
“Exposure was not just the railway,” Loynes said. “It was every client that depended on that route.”
Loynes said the same applies to technology. Many clients know their buildings and machinery well but know much less about the third parties, data and platforms they use every day.
She described AI as both an opportunity and a source of liability. It can improve analysis and service, she said, but can also “scale fraud and error, blur accountability” and create liabilities that are hard to anticipate. APRA warned in April that AI governance was not keeping pace with adoption.
Loynes said the protection gap now includes the difference between how resilient a business believes it is and how resilient it really is, on top of the familiar gap between economic and insured losses.
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Technology “will not replace advice”, Loynes said, though she expects automated underwriting to commoditise data access and routine placements, and annual renewals to give way over time to continuous, real-time assessment.
She cited NIBA’s Ready or Reacting? report, which found 83% of brokers expect technology and automation to significantly reshape the profession by 2035, while 61% feel prepared. NIBA’s follow-up research on technology and AI is due to be released before the convention closes today. Vero’s 2026 SME Insurance Index found 55% of businesses were comfortable with their broker using AI to support the process.
“A machine can identify a pattern, but only the broker can decide whether it matters for this business, in this market, in this moment,” Loynes said.
She urged brokers to start client conversations well ahead of renewal, covering where the business is heading, what it relies on and where disruption could begin. Because no broker can be an expert in every class, she said, part of the job is knowing when to bring in specialists. She also called on the industry to recruit and develop people with skills in technology, data, engineering, climate and finance.
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Loynes said insurers and markets need to work closely with brokers, and presented the Lloyd’s market as a home for risks that don’t suit standard products. She stressed underwriting discipline at a time when prices are falling. Marsh’s latest index shows Pacific commercial rates down 13% in the second quarter and property rates down 15%.
Although rates are easing in some areas, she said, claims costs are still rising and risks are becoming more complex. “Price matters, but it is not everything,” she said, adding that clear wordings, reliable capacity and expert claims handling were just as important to clients.
For risks that cross product lines or borders, or exceed one insurer’s appetite, she said the answer could be an open market placement, a binder, a consortium, a facility or a parametric product. “How we label it matters a lot less than whether we can provide the solutions.”
Loynes finished by urging brokers to move beyond the annual transaction. She said the future belongs to brokers who help clients “understand it, reduce it, manage it, and build resilience”, and who present risk management as a way to protect future revenue rather than as a yearly cost.
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