There is a paradox at the heart of the London market - what makes it so strong is what can also hold it back.
The strength is its cohesion and its ability to syndicate risk into world-beating limits with wide coverage that is hard to find elsewhere. The market is consistent and complex claims are processed in a co-ordinated way.
The flipside is that this creates a naturally conservative environment that is resistant to change. Amendments to time-honoured ways of doing business can only take place at the speed of the slowest mover.
This means that the pace of change lags behind more nimble actors in the world.
Such tardiness often precipitates a crisis - yet this plays right back into the market's key strength. The London market always performs exceptionally well when it has a crisis on its hands. Its cohesiveness and the imperative to act allows it to sweep aside the petty squabbling of party politics and grasp the nettle of reform firmly with both hands.
The post-scandal reforms of the 1980s, the Reconstruction and Renewal process at Lloyd's in the early 1990s and the big bang that merged the market's three competing bureaux into one are three salient examples.
Attempts at compulsion rarely have the desired effect. Prominent failures to reform, such as the doomed Kinnect electronic placing project, have usually occurred when one actor has tried to force the market to accept something before it is ready to do so.
Now the market is faced with a greater challenge than at any time in the past 20 years. Many believe the threat to reinsurance to be existential in nature, and competitive pressure in wholesale and specialty markets has never been greater.
The question is whether this threat is going to provide the spark that sends the rocket of reform straight up through some of London's quainter and more outdated market practices.
London has a fabulous opportunity to cut costs, improve service and put its shop window directly in front of any broker anywhere in the world.
And it has never been a question of technology as a barrier - it is a question of collective will.
Read on for a fascinating insight into the current thinking of senior members of the London community on this and many other key topics...
To read this year's London market roundtable please click here
Mark Geoghegan
Editor-in-chief, The Insurance Insider