At the same time, the risk landscape is filling with intangible and interconnected threats. Underwriting leaders describe insurers as grappling with an unprecedented surge in emerging risks driven by geopolitical unrest, climate extremes, rapid advances in AI, malicious cyber attacks and fast‑moving litigation trends. For Australian SMEs, that’s no abstraction: actuaries have highlighted a widening cyber protection gap for small business, while the national reinsurance pool has warned about sophisticated cyber terrorism scenarios.
