Insurers face significant enterprise risk management (ERM) challenges and opportunities in the current landscape.

The Covid-19 pandemic - and the multiple variants - remain a major concern for the industry, despite the successes of the global vaccination programme, and the threat of prolonged restrictions linger.

Technology is also changing rapidly with cloud technology gaining ground among insurers.

Colin Holmes, General Manager-Insurance at Moody's Analytics, notes climate risk is also finding its way into the fabric of how insurers and all financial institutions are run.

"Insurers and regulators are increasingly focused on understanding financial resiliency in the context of potential climate pathways, and the physical and transition risks that different scenarios entail," says Holmes.

He adds: "With regulators in many countries, including the US and Canada, reviewing practice, this is an area we expect to be active over the coming years."

The long-duration targeted improvements (LDTI) accounting change will also be a major development for the US life insurance industry.

Asked about the main challenges for insurers in the Americas, Holmes says the introduction of LDTI, combined with widespread interest in actuarial and finance transformation, continue to provide opportunities for replacing modelling software.

Amid all these forces of change, Moody's Analytics wins the category of ERM end-to-end solution of the year for ensuring its tools are delivered in a way that is easy to deploy and can support broader business needs.

For example, Moody's Analytics RiskIntegrity suite is a modular set of solutions designed for a range of risk and finance applications.

Overall, Moody's Analytics expects to see significant change in ERM modelling capabilities over the next few years as firms invest in this area.