The (re)insurance world has always experienced a clash between long-established practices and so-called "new normals" in market dynamics - often with the former winning out against all rational arguments to the contrary.
Tradition can be hard to break. However, with many of the new normals that are currently assailing the (re)insurance market, or look to be coming very soon - a continuing soft market, the growing reliance upon technology, the threat of disintermediation by technology providers - the over-riding message seems to be that traditional models of (re)insuring and managing commercial risks will have to change if companies want to remain relevant and profitable.
And it appears that the management of data - and the use of new technologies to do this - lies at the heart of the industry's future success.
A peek at some of the findings of our survey on page six gives a strong indication of the way things are going. The vast majority of survey respondents said technology has improved their ability to manage risk exposures, with technological advances top of the list of drivers changing their approach to exposure management today.
More fundamentally, most said their reliance upon technology has grown in the past five years, even as the industry as a whole has shown itself to be lagging behind in terms of technological innovation in the "data age".
While many are still wary of committing their data to a third party cloud provider, they are aware that they need to do something with their data - and furthermore, that there is significant value locked up in siloed data.
While we may be some way off from an industry standard tool that will do everything for (re)insurance players in terms of their data and exposure management needs, companies are already thinking seriously about ways to improve their modelling and analytics expertise in order to extract maximum value from their data.
In response to this growing trend The Insurance Insider, in partnership with Xuber, sought the views of market participants in order to understand the challenges they face and the landscape they operate in.
The results form the largest ever study into the changes impacting the risk landscape, examining the opportunities of today and the changes over the next five years.
We also put many of these questions to a panel of industry leaders, who came together at The City Club in London to deliver a highly topical and relevant debate about the role technology has played in changing the insurance market. An edited version of that discussion can be found within these pages.
And The Insurance Insider spoke to some leading market practitioners, in an in-depth series of interviews that sought to highlight their own experiences of bringing the power of modern technology to bear on companies' exposure management practices.
Please click here to read the Xuber Data Age Supplement.
Gavin Bradshaw
Features Editor
The Insurance Insider