Risk profession must evolve faster as threats accelerate, warns Swiss Re’s Hayden-Case
David Hayden-Case, head of UK customer management at Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, used his opening address at the AIRMIC Risk Forum in London to warn that the risk landscape is evolving faster than the profession designed to manage it.
Describing the theme of the event as a “provocation rather than a slogan”, Hayden-Case said research from the Swiss Re Institute showed accelerating and increasingly interconnected threats across climate, geopolitics, technology and society. Risks, he argued, now “stack, cascade and compound”, fundamentally changing what it means to be a risk professional.
He told delegates that traditional approaches focused on protecting balance sheets and operations were no longer enough. True resilience, he said, meant “bouncing forwards” – adapting and reinventing in the face of disruption – drawing on the concept of “anti-fragility”, where organisations improve after shocks.
Hayden-Case highlighted a widening global protection gap between insured and economic losses, driven largely by climate change. He pointed to hundreds of billions of dollars in worldwide losses last year, with secondary perils such as floods, heatwaves and wildfires becoming persistent rather than occasional, and insured catastrophe losses surpassing $100bn for the sixth consecutive year.
Climate risk, he added, was being compounded by geopolitical fragmentation reshaping supply chains, eroding trust in institutions and politicising trade, alongside the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, which is transforming decision-making and cyber exposure faster than regulatory frameworks can adapt.
He argued that resilience must sit “at the very core” of organisations, not at the margins, and said the forum’s agenda – covering AI, life sciences, cyber resilience, geopolitics and trust – reflected a single underlying question: how leaders make decisions under deep uncertainty.
Looking ahead, Hayden-Case said the future risk professional would be defined less by models and tools than by judgement, influence and integration across silos. The most resilient organisations, he concluded, are those preparing for multiple futures simultaneously, shifting from prediction to preparedness, and placing people and culture at the heart of adaptability.
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