The International Union of Marine Insurance used its annual conference in Rotterdam to debate whether freight forwarding liability insurance needs more systematic attention from the international marine insurance community. Freight forwarders now play an increasingly central role coordinating global supply chains, but IUMI said this subline has received far less structured attention than cargo insurance.
"The freight forwarder is often at the center of the supply chain organizing and arranging all relevant activities for their clients globally," said Matthias Kirchner, IUMI Executive Committee member and the workshop's chair. "This is becoming increasingly a strategic role, but unlike cargo insurance, there is no globally consistent wording for freight forwarding liability insurance. Legal and regulatory frameworks vary considerably between countries, while insurers generally use their own individual policy wordings."
Kirchner said IUMI could have a role addressing these challenges, potentially through a platform for sharing information.
IUMI's February 2026 webinar materials list global marine cargo premium at $22.6 billion for 2024, a well-established, tracked figure. The equivalent freight forwarding liability premium and loss data is marked simply "no data available." That's IUMI's own presentation slide acknowledging the international market lacks reliable aggregate statistics for this line, exactly the problem Kirchner's workshop discussed solving through an information-sharing platform and the collection of international market statistics.
Rotterdam builds on groundwork IUMI has already laid. The organization ran webinars earlier in 2026 covering freight forwarders' liability practices in China, Europe and the US, followed by a July session on India and France. Having mapped how differently the coverage works across major jurisdictions, IUMI is now weighing whether to push toward greater consistency.
The workshop discussed whether a global freight forwarding liability insurance standard could eventually be developed, but IUMI said this would require significant further consideration given how much liability frameworks differ by jurisdiction. Freight forwarders operate under a patchwork of national liability regimes, international conventions and individually negotiated contractual terms, and insurers currently write coverage against their own bespoke wordings rather than any shared market standard.
The workshop flagged risk areas extending well beyond the physical movement of cargo: forwarders' organizational structure, subcontractor oversight, documentation and information management, contractual arrangements, and incident and claims response.
Some of the innovation IUMI is discussing conceptually is already happening commercially. FIATA, the international freight forwarders' federation, partnered earlier this year with Otonomi, an insurtech specializing in cargo delay insurance, to give FIATA's member forwarders instant, algorithm-generated delay coverage quotes across air, ocean and e-commerce parcel shipments. That product addresses business interruption risk tied to shipment delays specifically, and shows the market responding to freight forwarder-specific coverage gaps even without the standardized wording or aggregated statistics IUMI is discussing institutionally.
For insurers and brokers active in freight forwarding liability, this discussion signals the subline is likely to draw more institutional attention over the coming year, even if a formal standard remains distant given the jurisdictional complexity involved. The more practical near-term outcome to watch for is a possible IUMI information-sharing platform, which would give underwriters a better basis for pricing and risk-managing a line that currently relies heavily on individual insurers' own claims experience rather than shared market data.
