On Aon Podcast: Opportunities in a Changing Market — What Risk Buyers Need to Know

On Aon Podcast: Opportunities in a Changing Market — What Risk Buyers Need to Know
November 21, 2025 13 mins

On Aon Podcast: Opportunities in a Changing Market — What Risk Buyers Need to Know

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In the latest episode of On Aon, Global Chief Broking Officer Cynthia Beveridge and Global Chief Claims Officer Mona Barnes discuss emerging trends in the commercial risk market as it heads towards the January renewals period.

Key Takeaways
  1. As organizations approach January renewals, they must adapt to a fragmented and rapidly evolving insurance market by reviewing and strengthening their risk programs.
  2. Despite generally favorable pricing, risk buyers face rising claims complexity and costs driven by natural catastrophes, inflation and adverse litigation trends.
  3. Success in today’s environment depends on close collaboration with claims advocates and leveraging insurer performance data to build resilient strategies for emerging risks.

Intro
Hello and welcome to this episode of On Aon — where we dive into some of the most pressing risk capital and human capital issues businesses around the world are facing. On today’s episode Cynthia Beveridge, Aon’s Global Chief Broking Officer for Commercial Risk, is joined by Mona Barnes, Global Chief Claims Officer for Aon.

Together, they examine the latest trends shaping the insurance market — from the dynamics of renewals and claims to the rise of innovative risk solutions.  There’s also plenty of practical advice for organisations navigating today’s complex risk landscape.

Cynthia Beveridge
Hello and welcome to the episode of On Aon. I'm Cynthia Beveridge, the global chief broking officer for commercial risk. Today we'll be talking about what we're seeing in the insurance market. This is a timely topic because many organizations in the market are now with their brokers working to finalize their January 1 renewals and others are starting to prepare for the 2026 renewals.

The market and risk solutions in general are really dynamic right now. Parts of the market are still softening while others are levelling off, and others are getting much more challenging.

And the solutions themselves are changing. New, more targeted risk transfer products and wordings are available. Protection is being strengthened through alternative solutions like parametric triggers, structured insurance, and facultative reinsurance solutions, as well as captives.

So, understanding what's happening in the market is more important than ever and will help companies strengthen and future-proof their programs. Joining me today to discuss claims trends and how they're impacting insurer behaviors is Mona Barnes. She's the global chief claims officer for Aon.

Mona Barnes
Cynthia, it's great to be here. I'm really excited to delve into this topic. The claims environment is dynamic now too. We're seeing a number of factors driving up claims costs.

But on a positive note, we are seeing more insurers being focused on delivering a better claims experience for clients. They're investing in their claims experts for high complexity matters, and they're accelerating their use of automation and AI for higher-volume, lower-complexity claims.

So Cynthia, perhaps you can start us off by taking us through the major market trends that you're seeing right now and what risk managers can expect.

Cynthia Beveridge
Absolutely, thanks. There are a few market trends that are key that I'd like to highlight. These are covered in our Q3 Global Insurance Market Insights that's available on Aon.com.

First, let's talk about the core market conditions across the major lines of business. The market is actually generally buyer-friendly. The insurers are growth-focused, competing aggressively and looking to differentiate themselves through pricing, coverage terms, and risk improvement support.
That support comes in the form of things like offering risk bursaries. This is presenting opportunities for clients to shore up their programs. We're encouraging clients to revisit past compromises necessitated by capacity limitations, restricted appetite and budget constraints.

Looking at the key lines of business, let's start with property. It's fueled by ample capacity right now and favorable reinsurance terms. Property is down about double digits with strong competition for well-managed preferred risks. But it's important to note that the market remains volatile at its core.
Macroeconomic pressures such as inflation, supply chain fragility and geopolitical instability continue to drive uncertainty in values, the replacement costs, and also business continuity exposures.

Another area, cyber and D&O, those are areas that are both down, but less so than previously experienced.

Auto and casualty, there are key exceptions to the soft market here. Auto is one of them. It's impacted by adverse claim trends and high repair costs, especially for today's tech-heavy fleets. And the US-exposed casualty risks are really plagued by adverse litigation trends.

Mona Barnes
Yeah, you're right, Cynthia. If I can jump in here, I'd like to share a bit of context about the claims landscape and how it's shaping these market trends.

So, you mentioned property and the fragility of the market there. Unfortunately, we're continuing to see natural catastrophes having a devastating effect on human life and property with extreme weather conditions. For example, Hurricane Melissa, the strongest ever storm to hit Jamaica, is one of the latest catastrophes where communities are trying to rebuild themselves and Philippines just had a devastating typhoon.

But despite climate volatility, we know that there are significant under-insurance. So we only see a fraction of those claims coming through compared to overall financial losses, which we know are being suffered.
You also mentioned how cyber and D&O pricing is moderating. On cyber, we've seen ransomware attacks increasing in both volume and severity with cyber criminals becoming more sophisticated in their tactics.

And we've also seen average ransomware demands increasing. But companies are becoming more aware of the challenges and implementing employee awareness and training, as well as making sure that their data security is regularly reviewed. And as in Aon's global risk management report, our clients highlighted cyber risk is the number one thing.

I also want to talk about adverse litigation trends in casualty claims. Nuclear verdicts rose by 52% between 2023 and 2024, and total awards more than doubled. The US plaintiff's bar continues to be really prolific in using tested litigation tactics, which include things like “anchoring”, where a high number is suggested to juries so that they're more inclined to give a higher award. And “reptilian theories,” where plaintiff lawyers appeal to jurors' emotions and empathy to increase and inflate the award numbers. And now we're also seeing “thermonuclear verdicts,” which are awards of more than a $100 million.

The activity of litigation funders is also contributing to the overall impact of social inflation. And all of this is concerning to insurers because settlement numbers end up being driven up when demands are so high because plaintiff expectations increase.

So, although social inflation is largely a U.S. phenomenon, we are beginning to see this creeping more and more outside of the U.S. in Europe and Australia in particular.

Cynthia Beveridge
So Mona, that's a good segue into the second trend we're seeing. A well-capitalized market, but one that the capacity is much more fragmented as insurers look to limit their exposures.

Capacity has increased across much of the market during 2025. It's flowing in from both traditional insurers and the reinsurance market, but notably it's fragmented. While most placements can achieve full tower limits, the towers are really compromised. It's comprised of more insurers and more segments.

Mona Barnes
Yep, we're seeing this fragmentation on the claim side as well. With more insurers participating on a risk, the consequential effect on us is that we've got more insurers to deal with when a claim happens.

That means that resolving those claims takes a lot longer because each of those insurers take time to review their coverage positions. They might instruct their own counsels. They may want to take different positions to their primary leaders. And that all leads to delays, to fractured markets and ultimately to frustrated clients.

To mitigate this, we deploy several strategies, including setting up market or steering committees early to get consistency, creating digital tools like Aon Claims Co-Pilot to get full visibility of market participants from the get-go.

And as a claims team, we work really closely with you, Cynthia, and the Broking team to give feedback on potential wording enhancements.

Cynthia Beveridge
Yes, this fragmentation also highlights the need to really look carefully at concurrency, especially after the last hard market cycle when non-concurrency became more prevalent, particularly in property.

Follow form language, when available, can address non-concurrency and can really provide a more cohesive market experience overall.

I'll go into what I think is the third observation or the third market trend. As I mentioned earlier, the risk solution environment is more dynamic. And I would like to call out this is the third market trend that we're seeing.

The growing availability of data together with technological advances is making risk transfer more creative, agile, and targeted.

We have traditional market insurance products that are the cornerstone of risk transfer but we're seeing more and more clients take advantage of alternative sources of capital such as parametric, captives, catastrophe bonds, multiyear structured and facultative solutions.

The enterprise solutions and blended programs have also become very prevalent as a cost-effective and efficient alternative to traditional limits. And then there's always tailored language and products that are created. Many insurers are really willing to revisit restrictive policy language given the competitive environment. That language was imposed during the hard market and everyone is willing to work with Aon to develop alternative products and language.

Mona Barnes
Yeah, Cynthia, that's a great recap. So, the three trends you're seeing are number one, a buyer-friendly market, bar auto and US casualty; sufficient capital availability, albeit in more blocks; and then thirdly, a proliferation of innovative solutions.

Cynthia Beveridge
That's right, Mona. All of these market trends combined with important changes in the risk landscape are impacting the claim space.

As Global Chief Claims Officer, what's standing out to you in terms of these claims trends?

Mona Barnes
Well, because we just talked about market trends, I'll start by highlighting a positive trend that we're seeing with insurers.

They're growth-focused and they're using claims performance as a differentiator when competing for business. That's great news for our clients. They're increasingly recognizing the importance of investing in their claims teams as they seek to outperform competitors. But it's a challenge because the war on talent, especially in places like London, is more intense than ever. So getting the best experts isn't easy.

Another investment they're making, as I mentioned above, is in AI. And these investments are helping to accelerate how quickly a claim gets paid and getting our clients back to business.

That said, most insurers still tell me that they consider the use of agentic AI without human interaction to be too risky, at least in the major lines of business.

So, I still expect their subject matter experts to be deeply engaged for the more complex claims.

Cynthia Beveridge
That's interesting. I see that AI and technology in general are being used more and more on the underwriting side. And it is, in fact, making underwriting more accurate and faster for those underwriters of insurance carriers.

Mona Barnes
Yeah, that's right. And in a trend that's on my second observation, it's a negative trend actually impacting clients.

Economic inflation, as I mentioned earlier, is impacting claims costs as the cost of raw materials, labor and supply chains has risen. And at the same time, US trade tariffs and global counter tariffs are causing uncertainty to organizations with longer or more complicated supply chains. So I mentioned before social inflation is having a big impact too.

And claims inflation is contributing to increasing costs of everyday items as companies are looking to recoup losses by raising prices on all items, including food, housing and medical care — as well as insurance.

Cynthia Beveridge
We've certainly seen a lot of negative impacts from inflation and social inflation on the underwriting side as well.

Mona Barnes
My observation would be that clients are increasingly looking to Aon's claims advocates for guidance on how to manage their claims risk against a backdrop of that volatility on numerous fronts, including litigation, climate, geopolitics, supply chains and talent.

Cynthia Beveridge
Thanks for that summary, Mona.

So the three claims trends you are seeing are the insurers are competing on claims performance, there are rising claims costs driven by economic and social inflation and there is greater reliance on claims advocates to help clients navigate an increasingly complex claims environment.

Mona Barnes
Yeah, that's absolutely right, Cynthia. And based on those trends, we're advising our clients to partner with your broker claims advocates who've invested in their claims workforces and they've got strong networks with insurers. They've got the experience to navigate you through your claims so that any insurer coverage issues are quickly resolved.

And then be guided by past performance. Work with your claims advocates to get to know your lead insurers and their ethos around claims management ahead of any claims.

And through our new Aon Claims Co-Pilot Platform, we'll be rating insurers’ claims performance to help guide clients in selecting their panels. That way, their decision to place insurance not only comes down to price and scope of cover, but it also comes down to their prior claims performance, which should always be a key factor when clients are selecting their insurer panels.

Cynthia, what's your advice to clients to navigate today's market environment?

Cynthia Beveridge
I would like to put this in three buckets.

The first one, use the opportunity to build resilience. Now is the time to review and challenge current insurance programs and explore alternative solutions. Use those premium savings to invest in expanded programs and additional coverages to future-proof your solutions and build that resilience.

The second one I'd say is use caution when changing insurers. While the insurers are actively pursuing growth, risk managers should really carefully weigh the pros and cons of switching providers against the value of longstanding relationships.
Competitive pricing may offer short-term gains, but it's equally important to consider the long-term reliability of the underwriting partners you're considering, especially their ability to deliver when it comes to claims.

The third one I'd say is leverage data and analytics. Organizations are encouraged to use risk analytic tools to review the adequacy of program limits, taking into account inflation trends, supply chain complexity, geographical and economic uncertainty.

Mona Barnes
Thanks, Cynthia. That's some really great advice. So, remember, you can find out more about the latest market and claims trends as well as get in touch with an Aon colleague to discuss how we can help your business by visiting Aon.com and searching for Global Insurance Market Insights.

Cynthia Beveridge
Well, that's our show for today. Thank you all for listening. In the coming weeks, we'll have more episodes on risk capital topics, including autonomous vehicles and what lies ahead in 2026. So, until next time.

Outro
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