Mr Riley addressed the Insurance Institute of London at Lloyd’s on the topic of “market reform are we there yet?” and said that while huge strides had been made there was no room for complacency or for the loss of the momentum of change.

“Our progress on the various initiatives that we have been championing, has been such that the need for fundamental ‘reform’ has passed,” he explained. “We are now engaged in the sort of continuous improvement process which all vibrant modern markets must pursue or risk their very existence. 

“The pace of change, particularly of technology, is such that you must keep up or your service offering will no longer be sufficient to satisfy the ever increasing demands of the sophisticated customer of the twenty first century.  That ongoing need to adapt to continue to thrive must become part of our everyday approach – the special status that a word such as ‘reform’ might bestow on the exercise had the potential therefore to give a damagingly finite impression of the life span of the work involved.”

Mr Riley added: “We have come a long way as a market.  We have, through contract certainty and the adoption of the Insurers’ Market Repository, fundamentally changed the way we do business. 

“London is no longer seen as the poor relation of the global industry in processing terms.  More and more we are again looked to by the rest of the world to provide a lead in how things should be done.  Just take the example of contract certainty.  A process that we embraced so convincingly in the period between 2005 and 2007 was introduced to Bermuda only this time last year.”    

However there is no room to slacken the pace of change he told the audience.

“So we may be there on market reform, but unless there was a ‘but’ I would have already sat down.  And the ‘but’ is the fact that we can have no room for complacency. 

“We must be proud of what we have achieved; and we should never be afraid of talking about it and ensuring that all our stakeholders are fully aware of the progress that we have made.  But we must accept that the extraordinary level of change we have achieved must now become the ordinary.

“Constant modernisation must become our mantra if we are not to throw away the recent gain in our competitiveness that has been so hard won.”

Mr Riley said the driver for the future change remained the desire to maintain London’s competitive position in the global insurance industry.

“New and vibrant alternative centres continue to abound and emerge,” he added.  “Increasingly sophisticated customers will continue to seek the right balance between price and precision in their portfolio.  Other markets for capital, now recovering from their traumas of the last couple of years, will renew their attempts to develop products that may erode the demand for traditional forms of insurance. 

“The increased risk posed by such phenomena as climate change means that we will need to generate extra capacity.  Other markets may therefore be filling a gap that traditional insurance is unable to, but that is to assume a model of successful co-existence that will only come to pass if we continue to step up to the plate in terms of client service. 

“So, in the midst of all this, we need to ensure that London can deliver a quality product via appropriate processing that does not introduce unnecessary impediments to the flow of business to our market.”