Global insurers call for cross-border cooperation to tackle evolving risks, widening protection gaps

Speakers and participants of the Korea International Insurance Conference 2026 pose ahead of the event's main session at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas, Thursday. Courtesy of Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance

Artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous technologies are rewriting the rules of risk, while more frequent climate-related disasters and geopolitical tensions are making that risk harder to predict and quantify.

Those shifts have left insurers grappling with questions that extend well beyond traditional underwriting and claims management: how to price emerging risks, how to narrow widening protection gaps and how to remain relevant as the nature of risk itself evolves.

Against this backdrop, more than 1,300 insurance executives, risk specialists and technology leaders representing 175 companies from around the world convened in Seoul this week for the Korea International Insurance Conference (KIIC).

The two-day event, held at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas with Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance as lead sponsor, was built around a theme that encapsulated those concerns: “Insuring the Future in a Changing Risk Landscape.”

Opening KIIC’s main session on Thursday, Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance CEO Lee Mun-hwa remarked that the industry must move beyond its traditional role of compensating losses after they occur and instead focus on anticipating threats and strengthening resilience.

“Insurance is evolving into something far more proactive — a service that predicts risks and prevents losses,” he said. “In this new era, I believe insurers must evolve beyond risk carriers. We must become architects of resilience.”

He stressed the need for greater collaboration across industries and borders in an increasingly uncertain environment. “No company, no industry, no country can do this alone. The challenges we face are interconnected, and the solutions must be collaborative.”

In a congratulatory address, Financial Services Commission Standing Commissioner Ahn Chang-kuk said that emerging technologies are creating new and unpredictable forms of risk by altering how responsibility is assigned. At the same time, those same technologies are opening the door to innovative services that could arm policymakers and insurers with more effective responses.

“Insurance can truly serve as a social safety net when it goes beyond the compensatory model and helps prevent risks based on data, expertise and a deeper understanding of emerging threats,” Ahn said, adding that doing so would require breaking down industry silos and sharing data across sectors.

Attendees of the Korea International Insurance Conference browse booths at the Sponsors Meeting Zone at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas, Thursday. Courtesy of Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance

The discussion then turned to the widening gap between emerging risks and the insurance industry’s current ability to absorb them. In a keynote address, Tracy-Lee Kus, co-CEO of Aon EMEA, identified three areas where that gap is becoming increasingly apparent: cyber, climate and geopolitical risk.

While global cyber insurance premiums totaled about $16 billion in 2025, the cost of cybercrime could reach $14 trillion by 2028.

“The product exists. The underwriting expertise exists,” she said. “What the market does not yet have is a credible way to price the most extreme version of that risk.”

Climate presents a different challenge. In many parts of the world, adequate insurance coverage simply remains unavailable. Citing Swiss Re data, Kus noted that 92 percent of economic losses from natural catastrophes across Asia in 2025 were uninsured.

She attributed the rise to rapid urbanization, infrastructure expansion and the concentration of assets in vulnerable coastal and flood-prone areas.

Geopolitical risk, meanwhile, has evolved from an occasional disruption into a persistent feature of the business landscape.

“Today, they are features of every year in every region,” Kus said. “They now sit on the balance sheet of every global company.”

Here, while insurance markets are capable of pricing geopolitical risk in real time, coverage can become prohibitively expensive for buyers during periods of heightened instability, with governments often forced to step in when private insurers retreat.

Each of those protection gaps requires a different response, she argued. On some occasions, however, they are converging in the same places.

Data centers illustrate the challenge. They face cyber vulnerabilities that can cascade across thousands of businesses, climate-related exposure due to their concentration in a handful of locations and geopolitical risks arising from the sheer value concentrated in a limited number of assets.

The conference’s second keynote shifted the focus from risk to opportunity.

Kevin Russell, a senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, examined how AI and new bio-frontiers are reshaping the insurance sector, from the emergence of new risk categories and changing claims patterns to lower operating costs and evolving assumptions in life and health.

Those themes carried into the afternoon’s industry sessions, which explored the implications of autonomous mobility, cyber risk and AI-driven transformation across the insurance value chain.

Beyond the conference stage, a newly introduced Partners Zone highlighted technologies that could shape the industry’s future. Exhibitors included cybersecurity and analytics firms such as Bitsight, CyberCube, Cyberwrite, Autocrypt and Moody’s Analytics, alongside autonomous driving company RideFlux.