About 200 senior insurance, risk and legal professionals gathered in Sydney yesterday to discuss regulation, compliance and running businesses amid growing uncertainty.

The Curium Compliance Summit – sponsored by law firm Clyde & Co and supported by Insurance News – examined experiences and best practice across a range of topics, with artificial intelligence looming large.

The opening session at the Opera House set the scene, as insurtech Curium’s CEO, Tetiana George, stressed the need to place risk and compliance at the heart of business, not treat them as add-ons.

She gave several examples of “living” risk frameworks where responsibilities were enforced, rather than being nominal codes.

Yvonne Lam, partner at Clyde & Co, noted recent and imminent regulations including the Financial Accountability Regime and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s CPS 230 risk standard and forthcoming CPS 510 governance standard.

Combined with officers’ duties under the Corporations Act, they mean the same conduct is often examined through different lenses, she said.

Vasyl Myroshnychenko, Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia and New Zealand, then gave a sobering address, entitled What Happens When an Entire Nation’s Risk Framework is Stress-Tested in Real Time.

Claims issues were next on the agenda, and Suneet Rangarajan, head of claims and responsible manager at Assetinsure, stressed the need to be “curious, not defensive” when receiving complaints. “How will [the ombudsman] read it, and the regulators?’ he asked.

He noted the growing use of AI by complainants.

“Two years ago, a complaint would be a one-liner – ‘I am not happy.’ Now I read five, 10, 50 pages of structured, sharp complaints,” he said.

Drew Schnehage, CEO of Clarion Claims, said AI has an important role summarising and triaging claims. She said it can stop stressed claims staff becoming overwhelmed and help keep them in their jobs – important given the Insurance Council of Australia’s recent assessment that one-third of insurance staff may leave the industry by 2030.

Luke Whenman, chief claims officer at Allianz Australia, said claims must become about prevention – the best one is the one doesn’t happen. The key is communication with the value chain, in which partners are representing your brand, he said.

Brokers were at the heart of two sessions where the potential and reality of AI was discussed.

BMIA Broker Network GM Debbi Thorne said brokers are generally “still not taking AI as seriously as we should. It can free up mundane tasks, take more efficient notes with clients’ calls, and gives us more face-to-face time.”

But she is concerned at a “knowledge and people gap” that AI cannot fill. “AI’s not perfect yet, and how do we challenge it if we don’t have the knowledge?”

Daniela Kirchlinde and Carli Kidd from the Insurance Brokers Code Compliance Committee examined breaches, half of which concern renewals, they said.

They stressed the importance of brokers looking behind the data to understand the real stories when reporting breaches to the committee. A renewal that was not communicated due to an error could highlight many different breaches, they said.