Ben Rose, a leading voice in the reinsurance sector, has issued a warning: the industry is on track to “waste $100 billion a year on data problems” if it fails to modernise its approach and share its information.

Speaking to The Insurer TV at the recent Rendez-Vous de Septembre in Monte Carlo, Mr Rose, the cofounder of insurance platform Supercede, described a system plagued by inefficiency, poor data quality and siloed technology.

“We’ve been trying to do some maths on this,” he explained, “because it’s not just one single piece, but it keeps having effects.” He pointed to the “uncertainty load of anywhere between 5 and 10 per cent and across the whole industry, you know that could be $25 billion of overspend,” adding that “leakage, which, again, is probably another $25 billion,” results from poorly structured post-placement processes.

Mr Rose criticised the industry’s tendency to “build everything in-house, like in little islands, where every insurance company has its own island with a [chief information officer] who’s been given a big budget to go and spend on building something creative in house that inevitably doesn’t talk to anybody else’s technology island.”

He warned: “I would expect that if 2025 isn’t the year, then probably 2026 will be where we breach the ‘reinsurance industry wastes $100 billion a year on data problems’ sort of milestone, so we’re doing our best to stop that.”

Mr Rose’s call to action is clear: “Until we get a real rallying cry for the industry to share better information with their reinsurers, you might as well give up on [artificial intelligence].”