Briefing: Sector must showcase ‘collaboration, certainty and creativity’ to bolster reputation

For a significant part of my career, I held various responsibilities at professional body the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII), including being the chair of what was originally known as the CII Broking Faculty – this is now called the Society of Insurance Broking.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this job was being involved in the New Generation Programme (NGP), which was only a year old when I took over in 2011.

The NGP empowers bright, young emerging stars from our sector to identify and complete a project or initiative that could make a positive change to the insurance profession. The programme gives the opportunity to stimulate debate, to show leadership and – hopefully – shape the future of our industry.

Participants – sometimes up to 40 of them – came from a large range of brokers, including large and small firms, generalists and specialists, London market organisations and regional companies. Each individual was sponsored by their employer, indicating recognition of a special talent.

It is very satisfying to see that, at a time when the CII needs to modernise and get its own house in order, that the NGP survives and seemingly thrives.

For example, on 24 February 2025, the NGP’s 2023/24 London Market Group published a report entitled When uncertainty calls, how does insurance answer? This considers how the insurance profession can help build public confidence and discusses the reputational impact arising from the London market’s response to the war in Ukraine, Irish Republican Army bombings and the Grenfell Tower disaster.

This is very apt when many of us are baffled by developments across the world – be they political, social, economic or environmental.

Pros and cons

Our job in insurance, whatever circumstance throws at us, has always been to instil confidence and trust – without this, what we sell has no value.

The aforementioned NGP report has taken time to look back at events such as the war in Ukraine or the Grenfell Tower disaster, to analyse how our market reacted, how this effected our industry’s reputation and what learnings we can take from these tragic events.

The publication sets out what has worked well for our industry’s reputation – such as the establishment of the Ukraine Grain Facility in 2022 – and what, sadly, did not. One example here would be 2017’s Grenfell Tower fire.

The former initiative clearly evidenced innovative work and the use of specialist knowledge that genuinely benefited society, whereas the latter example showed a distinct lack of collaboration which led to a failure to deliver a fair, affordable and timely solution.

Considering the horror of the Grenfell Tower incident itself and the understandable intense scrutiny at the time, it is a sad indictment that our industry was found so lacking.

According to the NGP group, collaboration, certainty and creativity are the driving values that should assist our profession in creating propositions for consumers that will build trust across our sector.

Although no one would disagree with this in principle, actioning such an ethos can be difficult in a disparate industry.

Collaboration

In my experience, bringing together industry leaders collaboratively rarely happens – and maybe this is the biggest clarion call that emerges for me from the NGP’s report.

Trade bodies like the ABI and Biba, as well as insurers and other market segments should be alive to the possibilities of a market failure in addressing emerging issues.

We have for far too long accepted issues in our marketplace, despite the fact we all knew the underlying models were not working – the property insurance debacle is just one example.

However, it is not all doom and gloom – there have been notable successes too, such as Flood Re for helping protect against weather events and Pool Re to address terrorist incidents.

Collaboration – which is not a lofty ideal – is particularly needed, as the NGP group pointed out, to innovate around evolving risks like systemic cyber risk and artificial intelligence.

My congratulations go to the report authors. It is a credit to them and to the CII that we have professionals in our sector that aim high for the benefit of our industry and understand relevant and serious issues impacting our reputation while still at the very start of their career.

That reputation, as always, takes a long time to build – but can be lost in a heartbeat.