As the Gulf conflict enters its third month, the Lloyd's market is doing what it has always done in a crisis: writing risks others do not have the specialist expertise to handle.
The Joint War Committee of the Lloyd's Market Association (LMA) expanded its listed areas (a "high-risk" designation) to cover the entire Persian Gulf following the onset of hostilities. War-risk premiums have surged 340% reflecting the 40+ attacks on vessels since the February 28 Iranian strikes, affecting a corridor that carries close to one-fifth of global oil flows.
Significant claims volumes have yet to be paid. When they do, Janine Powell, claims director at the LMA, said the London market will be expected to demonstrate the expertise it is known for.
"The London market, Lloyd's in particular, has a high concentration of experts," Powell said. "We are definitely the pre-eminent market for marine risks and we pride ourselves on that."
Yet the conflict arrives at a moment when the specialist claims talent pool is under pressure.
The complexity of the claims likely to emerge from the Gulf conflict should not be underestimated. Questions of proximate cause are likely to be among the first challenges. Determining whether a vessel's loss arose from an insured peril, or simply from being trapped in a conflict zone, may not be straightforward.
“Determining the extent of a trapped or damaged vessel's claim may not be straightforward”, Powell said. Practical difficulties will add further complications. Surveyors may struggle to access volatile areas, while cargo claims could involve disputes over delay, coverage triggers and loss quantification. Project cargo claims introduce further complexity, including rerouting costs and delayed start-up exposures.
"It's an incredibly complex situation," Powell said. "There will be a lot to unpack once we start to see more claims come in."
The challenge comes as the market grapples with a gradual erosion of specialist experience.
The LMA has been tracking the claims profession since establishing a baseline in 2023. A 2025 survey due to be published shortly shows an approximate 5% decline in professionals with more than 15 years' experience over the past two years. Powell cautioned against reading too much into a single data point.
"It's just one stat and you can't really read too much into it as one stat alone," she said. "There's a whole host of additional information that will come out when we publish."
The challenge extends beyond claims. The London Market Group's London Matters 2026 report warned that the proportion of London market employees under 30 could fall from 24% to just 7% over the next decade.
The LMA's response has focused on building capability earlier and transferring expertise faster. Two claims job simulations developed with Forage - a global learning platform with over six million enrolments - attracted 2,500 new entrants into the claims talent pipeline in 2025. A claims capability framework is being developed to define the knowledge and skills expected at each career stage. An emerging professionals community has also been established to accelerate networking and cross-class learning across the market's specialist claims workforce.
Particular attention is now being paid to mid-career professionals, who are likely to handle the most complex future losses. Data literacy is central to that shift.
"We need to get far more proficient at working with data, and that's not just manipulating the data, it's how do I convert these data sets into something that's insightful, useful, actionable to my business?" she said.
Data skills, stakeholder management and negotiation will become increasingly important, she added, as artificial intelligence takes on more routine claims handling and human judgement becomes concentrated on the most complex risks.
"We can't just wait for, heaven forbid, another big terrorist attack for people to get that level of experience," Powell said. "We've got to develop a way to simulate it."
The World Economic Forum observed in April 2026 that the Gulf crisis has highlighted a broader shift: risks once widely diversified and absorbed by private markets are becoming more geopolitical, harder to insure and increasingly reliant on government support. While this may be true for some of the longer term effects of the conflict the LMA has consistently argued there has been marine insurance available throughout.
For the London market, the challenge is ensuring specialist expertise keeps pace with increasingly complex risks. "We will meet that moment. There is no question about it," Powell said. "It's good for us, it's good for the insureds and it's good for the economy overall."
