IAIS Executive Committee's Toshiyuki Miyoshi sets out how the standard-setter is responding to a converging set of risks, from AI and geopolitics to alternative assets on life insurers' balance sheets.
During his opening address yesterday morning, IAIS Executive Committee Chair Toshiyuki Miyoshi, described an insurance sector navigating what has sometimes been called a polycrisis: geopolitical developments unfolding daily, elevated macroeconomic uncertainty, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence and intensifying climate risk, all increasingly amplifying one another across markets, sectors and borders.
The IAIS tracks this through its holistic framework, assessing systemic risk since 2020 across both firm-level vulnerabilities and sector-wide developments. Its annual global monitoring exercise draws on data from around 60 of the largest international insurance groups and more than 50 supervisors, covering over 90% of global written premiums.
The IAIS has watched life insurers' growing use of alternative assets, including private credit and asset-intensive reinsurance, since 2021. Systemic risk from this shift appears limited at the global aggregate level so far, he said, but the pace of growth, cross-border structures and concentrated exposures among certain insurers warrant close monitoring, work the association is now extending through enhanced data collection and supervisory material.
On AI, he said the association's approach is not to discourage innovation but to ensure it develops within appropriate governance, with supervisors watching for algorithmic bias, cybersecurity gaps, model risk, weak explainability and third-party dependency as insurers move AI from back-office use into consumer-facing decisions.
Alongside this, he pointed to a broader push for regulatory modernisation, making supervision simpler, more proportionate and more outcome-focused as supervisory budgets and specialist resources remain constrained.
On the protection gap specifically, he said the IAIS has worked to keep the issue on the global policy agenda since Japan raised it during its 2023 G7 presidency, publishing a Call to Action and, with the World Bank, a G20 input paper arguing that supervisors have a basis for action on protection gaps regardless of their specific mandates, even though closing them is not the responsibility of supervisors or insurers alone. The association is now building a publicly available resource hub with the World Bank.
Over the past decade more than 2,000 supervisors have completed IAIS-FSI training, with regional engagement now reaching 500 to 700 supervisors a year, nearly 80% from emerging market and developing economy jurisdictions; a recent collaboration with the IMF on IFRS 17 and risk-based solvency reached more than 200 supervisors across 19 Asia-Pacific jurisdictions.
The Insurance Capital Standard, adopted as a global minimum standard in December 2024, was, he said, evidence that a diverse membership can find common ground on complex issues.
"There may not always be a single answer that applies across every market," Mr Miyoshi said, "but given the cross-border nature of the challenges we face, there is a need for a common framework."