“I do think we are seeing a tsunami of regulation across the world,” Mr McGavick said. “This is, I think, another force leading to greater consolidation and I think an unwise one from the point of view of the consumer.”

Too often, McGavick said, regulatory rule changes done “in response to the last crisis tend to set up the cause of the next.”

And lost in the continuing conversation about changes, he said, is that the insurance industry was “an absolutely stabilising influence” in the financial crisis.

Regulators should take what works from the insurance industry and apply it to banks.

Risk and Insurance reported that according to David Sampson, President and CEO of PCI, global regulatory uncertainty is one of the industry’s long-term risks, said PCI’s Sampson.

He noted it was unclear what role the US government would take regarding new global standards and whether it would “intervene to protect the vibrancy of the US insurance market.”

“What we must guard against are policies that work to hinder the viability of a competitive private insurance market, namely the regulatory overreach by state, federal and international officials and laws that undermine a P & C company’s ability to operate on actuarially sound principals and that interfere with market dynamics,” Sampson said.