Keynote speech at the Geneva Association PROGRES-Seminar

Good morning, distinguished guests and esteemed colleagues,

It is good to see so many of you today here in Brussels. I truly hope you had a good summer. Also, thhank you, Jad, for your opening remarks. Let me also thank the organisers for bringing together such a timely programme and such a wide range of perspectives.

Over the course of this conference, you will hear discussions on a wide range of topics and risks, including geopolitics, retirement, health, artificial intelligence, data, private credit and operational resilience. At first sight, these topics may look like separate panels on separate risks. In reality, they form one story.

They all test the boundary between the risks that insurance can understand, price, pool and absorb, and the risks that households, businesses and governments must carry themselves.

That boundary defines the new insurability frontier.

We agree on the starting point: insurance plays a central role in resilient societies. It protects people when shocks occur. It helps businesses recover. It converts uncertainty into long-term promises. With that it supports financial health, which is critical for society. It also channels savings into investment and supports economic growth.

Yet, the context around us has changed. Geopolitical shocks travel faster through energy markets, supply chains, sovereign yields and cyber networks. Climate change and natcat events challenge the assumptions behind historical loss data. Artificial intelligence scales both opportunity and vulnerability. Demographic change transfers more retirement as well as long term care risk from institutions to individuals. Meanwhile private markets and cross-border structures are creating new links across the financial system.

So, we cannot treat insurability as a fixed line on a map. The frontier moves. It advances when we understand risk, reduce risk and share risk well. It retreats when uncertainty grows faster than our capacity to manage it. This sounds a bit like a paradox, doesn't it? For isn't managing uncertainty at the core of insurance? so today, I would like to make one central argument: to keep the frontier open and manage new uncertainties we must see risks earlier, share risks more effectively and shape transformation responsibly.

I will develop that argument through three themes: anticipating connected risk ; the collective task of keeping risks insurable; and building trust through responsible innovation, value for money and smarter regulation.

1. SEE RISKS EARLIER: ANTICIPATING CONNECTED RISK

Let me start with the risk environment.

For many years, supervisors treated geopolitical tension mainly as a severe but remote scenario. Today, geopolitical fragmentation shapes the baseline. Conflicts, trade restrictions, shifting alliances and security concerns now influence daily investment and financial decisions.

Recent tensions have again shown how quickly events can affect energy prices, equity markets and sovereign yields. Europe now relies on more diversified energy sources than it did in 2022. Yet higher refinancing costs, greater defence needs and less fiscal space change the way a new shock can travel through the economy.

Insurers feel these shocks through several channels. Market repricing affects investment portfolios. Inflation raises claims costs. Higher financial pressure can change policyholder behaviour. Supply-chain disruption can affect underwriting losses. Cyberattacks can accompany geopolitical conflict and test both insurers' own operations and the cyber risks that they cover.

Anticipating risk does not mean predicting the next conflict, catastrophe or market correction. It means identifying the transmission channels before a shock exposes them. It means looking beyond individual risks and asking how they can interact, reinforce one another and reach policyholders, firms and the wider economy.

Europe's insurance and pensions sectors enter this environment from a position of strength. Strong solvency and liquidity positions have helped undertakings and groups navigate recent volatility. That resilience matters. But we should not take it for granted. Strong capital gives us time to act; it does not remove the need to understand how risks interact.

Preparedness therefore matters to build resilience. The Insurance Recovery and Resolution Directive strengthens Europe's ability to manage distress, preserve critical functions and protect financial stability. Yet, a resilient system does not assume that nothing will fail; it prepares to manage the consequences in an orderly way when something does.

These two principles, resilience and preparedness, must guide our actions as financial markets evolve and new channels of risk emerge. Private credit offers a clear example. European insurers held more than 500 billion euros in private credit at the end of 2025, around five per cent of their total assets. These investments can diversify portfolios, offer an illiquidity premium and match long-term liabilities. They can also support companies and projects that public markets do not serve well.

Yet opacity, leverage, concentration and valuation uncertainty can turn those benefits into vulnerabilities. Private assets do not provide the same price signals as traded instruments. Complex structures can hide common exposures. Stress can reveal links that firms did not fully recognise in normal times.

The right question does not ask whether private credit is good or bad. It asks whether an insurer understands each investment's structure, valuation, concentration and liquidity profile, and whether it fits the insurer's liabilities and risk appetite. Funded and asset-intensive reinsurance raises a related question. These transactions can transfer insurance and investment risk, improve capital efficiency and widen investment opportunities. At the same time, they can increase counterparty risk, create recapture challenges and move assets across complex cross-border structures.

Against this backdrop, the principle should remain clear: capital optimisation must reflect a real and fair transfer of risk. Supervisors need sufficient visibility over the economic substance of each transaction, the location and quality of assets, the concentration of counterparties and the insurer's ability to recover those assets under stress.

Yet, the complexity of these new cross-border exposures calls for a more coordinated supervisory approach from the outset.

No national supervisor can see every cross-border exposure alone. No authority can assess a global technology provider through a purely domestic lens. No jurisdiction can contain a major climate, cyber or market shock at its border.

EIOPA's Strategy Towards 2030 places supervisory unity at the centre of our work. Supervisory unity means that EIOPA and national supervisors act as one community, with a European mindset, common objectives and the capacity to respond in a consistent and timely manner. It means harmonising where possible and centralising where needed.

From a European perspective and with a European mindset, by bringing together data, expertise and supervisory experience across jurisdictions, supervisory unity helps us identify risks earlier and challenge comfortable assumptions before they become vulnerabilities. And that brings me to the second theme.

2. KEEPING RISKS INSURABLE

Climate change gives the insurability frontier its clearest physical form.

Floods, storms, wildfires and heatwaves now occur with greater frequency, severity and unpredictability. We saw it again this summer, as extreme heat and drought fuelled some of the worst wildfires France and Spain had faced in decades. Historical experience still matters, but it no longer gives us a complete guide to future losses. In Europe, insurance has covered only around one quarter of natural catastrophe losses over recent decades.

That figure tells us more than the size of a market gap. It tells us who carries the consequences of the disasters. When insurance does not cover a loss, households use savings, businesses delay investment and governments face pressure to fund recovery. Uninsured losses can deepen inequality and slow economic recovery.

The insurability frontier could retreat gradually. Premiums rise. Underwriting decreases. Exclusions expand. Eventually, people may find cover unaffordable or unavailable. By the time insurers withdraw from a market or business line, society may already have missed the opportunity to act preventively.

On the other hand, the insurability frontier could also move forward, by helping society move from payout to prevention.

Insurance will always provide financial protection after a disaster. But it can also help society act before a disaster occurs. If households, businesses, insurers, local authorities and governments all play their part across the ecosystem - starting with risk mitigation and adaptation - the insurance protection gap can be reduced, and overall resilience strengthened.

This requires, in practice, three layers of action.

First, we need better risk awareness and better data. EIOPA's natural catastrophe protection gap dashboard brings together losses, risk estimates and insurance coverage across 30 European countries, helping identify where protection gaps are widest and where affordability or availability may come under pressure.

Our Catastrophe Data Hub adds more granular information on insured exposures and losses, supporting supervisory and financial stability analysis.

The proposed PROTECT tool would translate this evidence into practical guidance for citizens, helping households understand the hazards they face, the insurance available and the measures they can take to reduce damage.

A European Observatory on Insurability could connect these different strands of information. By monitoring prices, deductibles, exclusions and the availability of coverage by peril and region, it could provide an early warning when the insurability frontier starts to retreat. Together, these tools would connect risk monitoring, public policy and individual prevention.

Second, we need prevention and adaptation at scale. Measures that reduce physical exposure, from flood protection and more resilient buildings to effective warning systems, can limit losses and help preserve the availability and affordability of insurance.

Insurers can reinforce these efforts by incorporating incentives for prevention into product design, underwriting and pricing. EIOPA is also assessing whether and how the Solvency II framework could better reflect proven adaptation measures, while preserving risk sensitivity, proportionality and an evidence-based approach.

Third, we need smarter risk sharing for extreme events. Building on earlier work by EIOPA and the European Central Bank, EIOPA and European Stability Mechanism staff have proposed a European risk-sharing mechanism composed of a natural catastrophe insurance pool and a loan-based backstop.

Whether Europe should establish this mechanism, and how it should design and implement it, remains a matter for political deliberation involving Member States and the relevant decision-makers.

Any such mechanism, however, must complement, not replace, prevention and adaptation. EIOPA has consistently stressed that risk-sharing solutions should remain conditional on effective risk-reduction measures and should allocate costs and responsibilities clearly across the public and private sectors.This requires a layered approach.

Households, businesses and public authorities must invest in prevention. Insurers and reinsurers must price and pool the risks they can manage. Capital markets can provide additional capacity. For exceptionally severe events, carefully designed public support may provide a further layer of resilience, at national and European level.

No single actor can close the protection gap alone. Insurability does not emerge from an actuarial model alone; society sustains it through prevention, data, shared responsibility and trust.

3. SHAPE THE FUTURE OF INSURANCE: INNOVATION, VALUE FOR MONEY AND SMARTER RULES

Finally, my third theme concerns the transformation we want to see, in the insurance sector as well as in supervisors.

The insurance sector of the future will use more data, artificial intelligence and advanced technology. Artificial intelligence now moves from experimentation into established use across finance. EIOPA's survey of nearly 350 insurers in 25 European countries found that 65 per cent already used generative AI and another 23 per cent planned to use it within three years.

This development can improve fraud detection, claims handling, customer service, risk analysis and internal efficiency. It can also help supervisors analyse large volumes of information and identify emerging patterns.

Supervisors will also rely more on advanced technology. But technology alone - for both industry and supervisors - will not define success: innovation must deliver better outcomes while at the same time preserve resilience.

Scale changes the nature of risk.

When many insurers rely on the same model, cloud provider, data source or application, one weakness can produce correlated errors across the market. A defective update can affect pricing, underwriting or claims at several insurers at once. Common bias can exclude consumers at scale, while provider concentration can create vendor lock-in. More capable models can also strengthen cyberattacks.

The EU already has strong foundations. DORA addresses ICT risk management, testing, third-party risk and oversight of critical providers, as well as incident reporting and sharing of information in critical situations as well as before. The AI Act sets requirements for AI systems and general-purpose models. Insurance-specific legislation adds governance, prudential and conduct safeguards.

We should now prioritise implementation and coordination.

Another transformation is one that strengthens trust in the insurance sector. For consumers, trust begins with a simple question: does the product deliver value for money? People judge insurers by whether products are fairly priced, offer meaningful coverage, are easy to understand and provide reliable support when a claim arises. Technology alone will not earn trust if customers cannot understand what they are buying, if its price does not reflect the benefits provided or if the product fails them when they need it most.

This brings me to my final point.

Trustworthy transformation also depends on a regulatory and supervisory framework that is focused on outcomes, without creating needless complexity. This begins with simplifying the existing rulebook, but it should also prompt a broader reflection on how regulation and supervision can become structurally simpler without sacrificing protection or resilience.

Too often, regulatory frameworks evolve through a familiar cycle: periods of simplification are followed by crises, which trigger waves of new rules, only for complexity to accumulate until simplification once again becomes the objective. Rather than repeating this pendulum, it may be time to reconsider a more principles- and outcomes-based approach to regulation and supervision.

Such an approach would place greater emphasis on supervisory assessment, accountability, and the achievement of regulatory objectives, rather than ever more detailed prescription. This means giving supervisors greater scope to assess how principles apply to specific circumstances, while holding firms accountable for the outcomes they deliver. It also means accepting a degree of uncertainty ex ante: not every situation can be fully prescribed in advance. In return, the framework can become more adaptable, resilient and effective.

CONCLUSION

Let me return to the frontier.

The new insurability frontier does not separate safe risks from dangerous risks. It separates risks that society manages with foresight, cooperation and trust from risks that society allows to become unmanageable.

We need to move that frontier outward and we can.

We can move it when we see risks earlier: by connecting geopolitical analysis, financial stability, cross-border supervision and crisis preparedness.

We can move it when we share risks more effectively: by investing in prevention, closing protection gaps and building public-private solutions for losses that no single actor can carry alone.

And can we move the frontier forward when we shape transformation responsibly: by governing AI and data effectively, strengthening operational resilience, ensuring that innovation delivers value for money for consumers, and making regulation smarter and simpler without weakening protection or supervision.

These tasks require insurers, supervisors, policymakers, technology providers, businesses and citizens to recognise their part in the system.

Insurance cannot promise a world without shocks. Regulation cannot eliminate uncertainty. Supervision cannot predict every crisis.

But together, we can preserve society's capacity to take risk. We can protect the confidence that allows people to plan, businesses to invest and economies to adapt.

Insurability is not a gift that markets deliver on their own. It is a collective achievement.

Let us keep that frontier open, fair and resilient - for today's policyholders, for tomorrow's pensioners and for the generations that will live with the choices we make now.

Thank you.