The managing director of Axa XL praised Bermuda for doing “a good job” promoting insurance as a career but said that the industry was lagging globally.

“Bermuda does not really have any issues attracting personnel,” Patrick Tannock said. “Insurance is the economic engine that drives the country.”

However, he said that in the wider world, only 4 per cent of millennials were interested in insurance careers.

“Only 20 per cent of people in insurance are under 30,” he said. “By 2025, millennials are expected to make up the majority of the overall workforce. We have got to do a much better job in terms of being our own best advocates on the value proposition of insurance.”

Mr Tannock made his comments during a keynote conversation at the Bermuda Risk Summit with Soraya Wright, Amazon global head of corporate risk and claims.

“The war on talent is real,” Ms Wright said. “We need to make insurance exciting and demonstrate and promote the value of what these carriers can do.”

During the discussion, the pair also touched on a the need for more risk solutions for intangible assets in the market.

“Never before, in the history of the planet, have we had so much uninsured risk,” said Mr Tannock, who is also chair of the Association of Bermuda International Companies. “The delta between uninsured risk and insured risk is really growing.”

He attributed this to the exponential increase in intangible assets.

“We need to do more, especially when you factor in that the top ten companies on Wall Street do not really make anything tangible,” he said.

Intangible assets are defined as things like goodwill – the gap between the purchase price and fair market value, brand value and intellectual property. They make up a share of corporate balance sheets and have an impact on company valuations.

American and, to a lesser extent, European companies tend to be intangible-asset heavy, while corporations in Japan, in emerging markets, often have more tangible assets.

Ms Wright said there were “opportunities” to do better in the intangible risk arena.

“With this sector, there is so much information and data,” Ms Wright said. “It is not just the data, but the insights and the value of the insights that a firm has.”

She said risk management was about getting property and liability insurance but today firms had to think about their portfolio of risk.

“If you think about that whole portfolio of risk, what are the top ones we need to focus on?” she said. “What are those things we are monitoring? That is how I think about risk and building strategies.”