Forum, held at the Southampton Princess in Bermuda last week.

Almost 600 insurance industry delegates came to Bermuda from all over the world, in the company of a horde of media people, live television cameras, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated computer guru and a golfing star.

It must be hard to convince colleagues and spouses that a week-long conference in Bermuda is going to be hard work, and for the most part it wasn't. A golf clinic, cigar smoking and wine tasting sessions do not fall into the category of all work and no play.

But the point of the World Insurance Forum, an event of the quality (if not, perforce the quantity) of RIMS and Monte Carlo, is not to work the cream of the global industry that hard; it is to allow them to meet and greet each other, to build, at a personal level, the networks which are the building bricks of the empires their companies are constructing.

The formal sessions were fascinating, almost without exception. The Forum attracted some big names in the world of insurance: the chairman of Lloyd's, who spoke and left the Island very quickly, and dozens of chairmen, presidents and chief executives, operating and underwriting officers of some of the world's largest insurance companies, brokers and other interested parties.

This year's buzzwords were `convergence' and `scale' but the main question, the one topic which dominated each of the sessions and much of the sideshow hard talk, was the soft market.

The insurance industry is awash in capital. As a result, rates, the insurer's sales prices, have dropped lower and lower, and lower still. Some insurers will confide that they are writing at a loss, in order to stay the course, allowing the investment portfolio to carry the slack in an age of ever-rising stock markets. Recent volatility in the bond markets has squeezed the industry even harder.

Against this backdrop, the 1999 Bermuda Symposium IV, co-named the Forum, searched for definitive answers and came up, as one might expect, with a range of views.

The worst news came from the man rated fourth most influential in changing computing, the Bermuda-based James Martin. In a visionary lunch-time speech, he more or less told his audience that none of them was ready for what is about to happen. E-commerce, the author of more than 100 books said, was about to rewrite the face of all industries. This was rich meat to serve the delegates at lunch-time.

The most immediate change the insurance companies have to face is convergence, a capital markets process by which banks are muscling in on the insurance industry. The move is a very real threat to the well-being of traditional insurance brokers.

BUSINESS BUC