The London market has spent more than three centuries refining the business of transferring risk. Christopher Croft (pictured) believes its next evolution may require something more fundamental.
Speaking to Insurance Business UK at BIBA 2026, the LIIBA chief executive argued that London's future competitive advantage will not come from simply placing more insurance. Instead, he believes the market must broaden its role and become what he describes as a "genuine risk management centre", helping clients manage a wider range of risks rather than simply placing insurance.
Some of those solutions will involve insurance, he said, while others may involve different forms of risk mitigation altogether.
Perhaps the most distinctive argument Croft made at BIBA was a challenge to one of insurance's oldest conventions: the annual renewal cycle.
"We're going to move away from a world of annual renewal cycles to one where the technology is so sophisticated that you are constantly reassessing your clients' risk," he said. "Different financial instruments that allow you to trade risk in almost real time."
For clients whose exposures fluctuate significantly, particularly those facing natural catastrophe risks, annual pricing can be a blunt instrument. Croft envisages a future in which those risks are continuously modelled, repriced and potentially transferred through more dynamic mechanisms than traditional annual policies allow.
"Derivative trading has been sort of holy grail for about a quarter of a century," he said. "But I think it's now possible."
Much of the debate around AI and automation assumes intermediaries become less important. Croft believes the opposite may be true. Rather than reducing the need for intermediaries, increasingly sophisticated risk solutions could make specialist advice more valuable.
"The role of the broker becomes incredibly, incredibly important because it's a much more complex solution," he said. "You will be more reliant on your intermediary than you are at the moment."
If clients are managing a wider range of mitigation strategies and financial instruments, the broker's role increasingly becomes one of adviser, coordinator and strategic partner.
Croft was equally clear that London's current position offers no guarantee of future leadership and the real risk is not technological change itself but London's failure to lead it. He argues the market has avoided the kind of disruption that reshaped other financial sectors and cannot assume that position will last indefinitely.
"If we aren't at the forefront of empowering the market through new technology, then there's the potential, there's a cliff edge," he said.
Importantly, Croft distinguishes between empowering the market and automating it. For him, the more important questions concern how technology changes trading behaviour, business development and the skills required of future market practitioners.
Croft's point is that AI can analyse a risk in isolation, but often struggles to account for the commercial relationships that underpin insurance trading. He pointed to situations where underwriters choose to support a broker relationship despite an individual risk looking unattractive in isolation.
"If you're an underwriter sitting looking at a risk that, in isolation, is a terrible bit of business that you should run away from, but is being presented to you by a broker who brings you a lot of really profitable business, you sometimes choose to write it as a favour," he said. "And AI would tell you not to."
The lesson, Croft argued, is not that AI should be resisted, but that commercial relationships operate according to a logic that is not always visible in the data.
London's position in global specialty insurance remains strong. But Croft's argument is that leadership is not guaranteed. The same technologies that could strengthen London's position could also erode it if another market adopts them more effectively.
The opportunity and the threat are ultimately the same thing. If London can lead the transition towards more dynamic, continuous risk solutions, it strengthens its position as the world's leading specialty market. If it cannot, another market may do it first.
The challenge, Croft argues, is not whether the market will change, but whether London helps shape that change or is forced to respond to it.
