For anyone who follows world affairs, or merely caught wind of what happened over the weekend with the G-7 summit, this will come as no surprise: President Donald Trump is shaking up insurance markets.
Speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London Monday afternoon, Inga Beale, CEO of Lloyd’s of London, the 330-year old U.K.-based insurer, noted that the current US administration’s style has made risk assessment a tougher business.
When asked about how her company considers the unpredictable actions of the U.S. and a world power that seems, at times, bent on disrupting the international order, Beale conceded that while “we try to plan for every eventuality, sometimes we cannot.”
The uncertainty emanating from America falls in line with trends Beale sees globally. Unlike a few decades ago (and even in an age of climate change), cities and businesses are more at risk of manmade disasters than natural ones. Tokyo recently topped Lloyd’s list of most at-risk cities, not because of earthquakes or tsunamis, but because of the developing situation with North Korea. New York ranked second on the list of 279 cities because of the threat of a market crash. (London, also primarily for risk of a market crash, rates No. 9).
The other possible man-made scenarios that Beale’s team plans for include political turmoil, violent conflict, and cyber attacks. Beale says she and a group of executives at the World Economic Forum recently mapped out a scenario in which one of the world’s three largest cloud providers goes down and estimated that, in just three days, the U.S. would lose $16 billion in business.
Beale says that cyber attacks are the events that keep most CEOs up at night partly because of the overwhelming shift in corporate assets from physical to intangible ones. “The risk landscape has completely changed,” she said, adding that she is focused on embracing technology and modernizing Lloyd’s so as to prepare for the next 330 years of business.
