For two days last week insurance executives gathered to talk shop at the annual Bermuda Insurance Underwriting Conference.The conference brought together insurance executives to discuss how Bermuda can retain its competitive edge, areas where the local market can collaborate and topics of concern.Though overshadowed in the media by Bermuda’s reinsurance industry, the insurance industry has been quietly writing significant amounts of business particularly in the excess liability, professional and property lines.“I would say that the majority of the Fortune 500 companies are existing clients in Bermuda or have purchased insurance in this marketplace,” said Chris Fisher, president of the Bermuda Insurance Institute, which hosted the two-day conference. “Our customers are basically every global commercial enterprise, so our customer base is immense. Our customers make cars, cell phones, generate electricity — anything you can think of.”While there isn’t an aggregate number of total premium written available for just the insurance industry, Mr Fisher explained that Bermuda’s marketplace is far reaching.“The Bermuda insurance market has probably been involved, as a material part, in all major claims payments on high-profile insurance claims over the last 20 years. We don’t market that point enough,” he said. “We don’t toot our own horn about how much we’ve paid and how quickly it’s done.”“We need to get better aggregate level data for the insurance market here in Bermuda and use it to really market the great job the companies in Bermuda do in terms of claims processing and payment,” he said.Bermuda insurance markets operate under an arbitration condition when there is a claims dispute rather than conducting litigation, which differs from the norm for many US-based clients.“If we could demonstrate with this data how many claims have been paid and paid quickly by the marketplace, I think would help us overcome some of their concerns,” he said. “It was evident from our claims panel during the conference that arbitrations very, very rarely happen. By far and away the majority of claims paid by the Bermuda market are paid well before we ever get to an arbitration type situation. We could do a much better job of telling that story.”The conference also focused on what Bermuda needs to do to continue to stay relevant in the global marketplace.“We don’t need to recreate the wheel to stay relevant, what we need what need is consistent evolution of existing products,” said Mr Fisher.Examples, he said, might be offering extensions to well-received products and syndication of market capacity — that’s to say, multiple insurance companies offering the same contract terms and conditions. The latter might be more geared towards new product lines or used with clients that are not Fortune 1000 companies, of which there are many looking for capacity in Bermuda.“There was broad agreement for some of these smaller clients, where a syndicated approach where each company puts up smaller lines of capacity might be better suited because the flow of that business is typically higher, there is more of those accounts,” he said.While conference attendees felt that the market shouldn’t rest on its laurels, the industry here is quite healthy and robust.“We need to be careful of guarding against complacency but the end of the day we should be very proud of the core product offerings — big, often net line, capacity offerings in excess liability, professional lines and property,” said Mr Fisher. “Our customers value that.”