Global and South African Insurance Market Insights

[Johannesburg, 8 April 2024]: Aon South Africa has released its ‘2024 Insurance State of the Market’ Report providing global and South African insurance market insights.

Resilience shaped the risk and insurance community in 2023. Economic inflation, a slow supply chain recovery, rising labour costs and persistent natural disaster activity pressured property loss costs and extended recovery periods. The regulatory environment also became more complex and focused on addressing matters related to insurer solvency, cyber incident disclosures, and the use of generative Artificial Intelligence, amongst many other issues.  Over the course of 2023, insurers responded to these and other dynamics of the risk and insurance environment by implementing their own resiliency measures, some of which impacted insurance market conditions.

According to the report, major trends in the South African insurance market, include:

• Securing sufficient insurance capacity from local and global insurers continued to be challenging, especially for global programs and for risk types that were not preferred.  
• The requirement to provide granular information such as geo-co-ordinates and value splits between property damage and business interruption remained burdensome and challenging for clients.  
• Inflation impacted underwriting and claims processes. 
• Natural-catastrophe-related coverage restrictions/exclusions were applied to specific locations, for example KwaZulu-Natal.
• Grid Collapse exclusions (Eskom load shedding risks) were fully embedded in underwriter placement terms.  
• Alternative Risk Transfer mechanisms, valuation services and business interruption analysis have become more prevalent. 

Key trends to watch in 2024 include:

• The continued threat posed by cyber risk as cyber attackers continue to exploit vulnerabilities and adapt their methods.
• Geopolitical and societal pressure to tackle climate change is mounting as energy transition efforts accelerate, requiring major investment.
• The demand for parametric covers will increase as confidence grows, providing a broader, more creative suite of risk management tools.
• Political, terrorism and strike risks loom large in an election year, requiring specialist broking experience of both the local and international insurance markets to structure the best coverage possible.

According to Alicia Goosen, head of commercial risk and chief broking officer at Aon South Africa, resilience remains a fundamental enabler of business strategies in 2024, as many of the economic, geopolitical, and humanitarian events that shaped 2023 will continue to evolve in 2024, and new trends will emerge, creating more challenges as well as opportunities.  “Challenging and unpredictable market conditions have refocused insurance buyers on the value, structure and overall cost of their insurance programme. The makeup of risk transfer is also evolving. In most cases, buyers will be faced with decisions around how to manage an ever-expanding and complex risk transfer need. It has never been more important to focus on Total Cost of Risk (TCOR) rather than risk transfer or premium cost.

“The current market dynamics create unique opportunity, incredible uncertainty, and risk that is increasingly connected, and more severe.​With this change comes a pressing need for businesses to make important decisions, more often. As Aon, we work closely with organisations and businesses to identify the risks they are faced with in order to make better decisions when it comes to addressing traditional exposures and emerging risks. One of the key drivers of negotiating successful renewals is for clients to be proactive and differentiate their risk, with thecurrent, selective underwriting environment calling for detailed disclosure and business profiles as well as a description of risk management and mitigation efforts.  It has never been more important for clients to leverage analytical tools like risk modelling and here Aon works closely with business to ensure that their risk differentiation is on point, and also ensure sufficient lead time for underwriters to review to get positive outcomes,” explains Alicia.

To download the 2024 Insurance State of the Market Report, please visit www.Aon.co.za/media/5pcbbk42/2024_state-of-the-market-report_p.pdf

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