Annual Insurance Review 2025

With the Christmas and New Year festivities already becoming a blur in the rear-view mirror, what better way to blow away the few remaining cobwebs and see-off the January blues than to immerse yourself in RPC's Annual Insurance Review 2025.

As ever, we have gathered insights from the finest insurance market experts from within RPC and across our Global Access partner firms, to present you with our assessment of 2024's main events and our hopes (and fears) for 2025, across key international jurisdictions and countless business lines. 

In our 2024 Annual Review we celebrated the diminishing impact of Covid on the insurance market, whilst acknowledging a host of growing risk-factors, including economic, climate, ESG and technological challenges.  

This year you will read how these issues have, indeed, impacted the market, and are likely to continue to do so.  The increased influence of AI, both as a driver of speed and efficiency within the insurance market and as a risk factor for claims, the systemic challenges it presents and its potential weaponisation by states as a cyber threat; the ongoing impact of higher-frequency extreme weather events; continued economic struggles across jurisdictions, including high rates of insolvencies; the growing risk of activist claims and regulatory intervention relating to ESG.  You will see all of these topics featuring heavily in the articles that follow.

But perhaps more than anything, 2024 has transpired to be a year of conflict.  Conflict in the physical sense has seen wars (or special military exercises, depending on your point of view) continuing, breaking out or threatened in more locations around the world than at any time in living memory. Conflict in a political sense has also continued to intensify with extreme polarisation of opinions and isolationism becoming the new norm, with consensus-building and internationalism seemingly fading in popularity.  (It says something about political tensions across the world when the attempted assassination of the US president elect – twice – is somehow relegated almost to back-page news in the annual of the year's global events.)  

These geopolitical tensions are set to continue, if not intensify, in 2025.  How governments and regulators deal with more inward-looking societies is likely to play a big role in the claims environment going forward.  You will read how sanctions, energy price disruptions and regulatory changes, amongst many other factors, are likely to impact different business lines – as well as the potential claims implications growing global conflict and volatility may bring.

As ever, insurance will continue to play a central role, not just in responding to conflict but also in shaping how businesses and individuals will be able to survive, recover and thrive in the coming years.  RPC and our Global Access colleagues look forward to working with you to help you to navigate the year ahead.

You can access the Annual Review below, either by links to jurisdiction or sector specific articles or in all its glory by downloading the full PDF.