Large corporate insurance buyers are rethinking what they expect from insurers as geopolitical instability, cyber exposure and regulatory fragmentation reshape the risk landscape. Increasingly, the discussion is moving beyond standalone policies towards integrated programmes designed to respond to risks that no longer sit neatly within traditional insurance lines.
For Luke Baker (pictured), director UK Global at Allianz Commercial, the pace of change affecting clients has fundamentally altered the role insurers are expected to play.
“The world has changed at pace and is continuing to change,” he said. “Our clients’ insurance and risk needs are kind of keeping up with that pace of change.”
That shift, he argued, is forcing insurers to play a broader role in helping clients manage resilience and operational complexity rather than simply providing capacity.
“We look at things like cyber and AI,” Baker said, “but geopolitical risk is also one of those things which is getting more and more attention at a board level within our client base.”
One of the biggest changes for large corporate clients is the extent to which risks now overlap operationally and financially.
“What strikes me is how interconnected these sorts of risks are,” Baker said, citing the growing overlap between cyber, AI and geopolitical threats.
That convergence is changing how insurers structure programmes. Baker argued that traditional product silos are becoming harder to maintain as claims increasingly span multiple areas of cover simultaneously.
“There’s an increasing degree of grayness in loss scenarios,” he said.
Property losses, for example, now regularly intersect with business interruption, cyber exposure and third-party liability in ways that were less common a decade ago.
“The products our clients buy have to be interconnected and very well dovetailed,” Baker said, “so that the risk of different claim scenarios falling between the gaps between traditional silos is really minimised.”
He suggested the insurance market still has further to go in adapting products to reflect that reality, arguing that insurers continue to approach many exposures through “too much of a siloed monoline approach”.
The shift towards more integrated risk solutions is also increasing pressure on multinational insurance programmes. Baker said geopolitical fragmentation, protectionist trade policies and diverging regulation are making global programme coordination more difficult than in previous years.
“Having that cohesive multinational programme is very important,” he said, “but getting harder to deliver.”
The challenge is not simply scale, but ensuring local compliance and operational consistency across increasingly fragmented jurisdictions.
That has reinforced the value of insurers with established international networks and local underwriting expertise, particularly as regulation and political risk continue to evolve unevenly across markets.
As corporate risks become more complex, some clients are increasingly turning to alternative risk transfer structures beyond conventional market solutions.
“Clients are choosing to pool their risks together on a non siloed basis,” he said.
That can include combining property, casualty and financial lines exposures into broader structures or using captives and fronting arrangements to retain risks internally while maintaining programme flexibility.
“For the more mature insurance buyers,” Baker said, “having that mechanism to transfer risk that perhaps the conventional market can’t do is an important thing.”
London’s specialty market continues to play a significant role in supporting those complex placements, particularly in areas such as political violence, aviation and emerging geopolitical exposures.
While underwriting discipline remains central, Baker argued that differentiation increasingly comes from how insurers support clients before and after losses occur. Importantly, he rejected the idea that underwriting sits separately from service.
“Underwriting is a service,” he said.
That expectation now extends well beyond claims handling into ongoing operational support, risk engineering and responsiveness during periods of disruption or corporate change.
“When clients are going through M&A activity, when they have queries on coverage or contracts they’re entering into,” Baker said, “having underwriting teams that are able to service those requests is really important.”
Technology and AI are also becoming more closely embedded within that support role, particularly through risk monitoring, transparency and faster operational insight.
As risks become more interconnected and volatile, Baker believes large corporate clients are placing greater value on insurers that can provide continuity, coordination and flexibility across increasingly blurred exposures.
“The risk features have changed,” he said. “Having the confidence in their insurance partners that they can change with them, evolve with them and offer products that do what they need to do is a really core need.”
