Marketplaces and exchanges: Ten ways they are reshaping insurance

It is difficult now to ever envisage one single exchange or handful of exchanges in the middle of the global risk ecosystem on which every stakeholder is willing to play. Instead, the insurance industry is going to have to confront the fact that there are and will continue to be a myriad of marketplaces – those already established plus new marketplaces using technology, approaches and models not available or even saleable the first time around. They provide different types of solutions, seek to tackle a variety of different industry issues and apply new techniques, technologies and models.

This creates a new challenge for the insurance market. For a decade or two most of the industry has assumed that market forces and/or the dominant industry players would take responsibility for creating a trading solution that fulfilled market needs. There was therefore no need to do anything proactive - the strategy of choice was to do nothing and wait for the solution to emerge, safe in the knowledge that your company alone could not make it.

However, as one era ends and another begins we are entering a new phase in which there are many moving parts and much of strategic significance to ponder. In particular, what to do in a world where there are a lot of solutions and no marketwide initiative to hide behind.

This report focuses on ten ways marketplaces and exchanges are reshaping insurance.