‘Adapting and Overcoming’ in a 6-year Hard Market

Conference discussions among insurers in 2025 include the fact that the we have been in a hard market for 22 quarters. Let that sink in. 22 quarters, that’s almost 6 years. The industry has seldom seen a hard market last for more than 6 months let alone 6 years. And… no one is quite sure what will take us out of it.

The US Marine motto comes to mind as a possible next move for the industry; “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome”.

We have already seen seismic change in the insurance market – and we suspect these trends have emerged as an adaptation to this extraordinary impasse of a 6-year hard market.

• – Exploding market of self insureds with a multi-layer tower structure (12 or more in many cases)
• – Captive insurance structure developing in the face of rising premiums for certain business classes
• – Specialty towers are forming to manage unusual risk

From our perspective, we see enormous effort to mitigate risk at underwriting, which is the industry’s first move in every risk scenario. However, risk on the claim side (where we live) could use more attention — not every claim needs to be investigated, but probably putting a social media Sniffr on a questionable file right away would help identify malingering or bad intent sooner than waiting for a 2nd year adjuster at a TPA desk to notice something is amiss after paying on the claim for five years.

Doubling down on our position, we wonder if the reason carriers are refusing to write higher risk because they have experienced too much loss on the claims side without even identifying that the issue! Maybe less loss in payouts would increase appetite for risk in underwriting.

But here we are. Fraud Sniffr has adapted to this strange new world as well by building file sharing tools so all forty five (or so) attorneys in the tower can view surveillance data throughout the mediation and trial process. We are on your side looking for indicators of nuclear verdicts, and we are sussing out questionable medical practitioners.

Working together we should be able to continue navigating a hard market, or slowly start moving back to a more normal environment.

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