Feeling lucky?

The continuing soft commercial market could be a major threat to the industry, unless lady luck intervenes again, says Tony Cornell

Although luck is not something you should mention to insurance CEOs, they do appear to have had more than their fair share of it since 2004. I know the mantra is ‘the harder I plan, the more luck I seem to get’ but events since then have been very much in general insurers’ favour. The hardest market this industry has ever known was 2003/4. The enormous jump in premiums were well beyond insurers’ wildest expectations and were at a level that they could not only cover the costs of rectifying all