Businesses face growing losses despite widespread access to insurance as modern risks outpace traditional coverage

Singapore, 2 November 2026: Many businesses across Asia Pacific could face significant uninsured losses despite purchasing insurance as disruption increasingly stems from interconnected risks that traditional coverage was not designed to address, according to a new white paper from specialist insurer, Tokio Marine Kiln (TMK).

The analysis ‘Priced but not Understood’ argues that the region's protection gap increasingly reflects a disconnect between how losses occur in practice and how insurance policies are structured. While insurance capacity has expanded significantly across Asia-Pacific, that growth hasn’t always resulted in better protection. Many businesses continue to absorb large financial losses when disruption spreads through supply chains, technology networks, or critical infrastructure.

According to TMK, the issue is no longer simply whether insurance is available, but whether it reflects the realities of how modern businesses operate. While affordability, awareness, and access remain important in some markets, the white paper argues they do not fully explain why significant uninsured exposures persist even where insurance is widely available.

Many organisations are not uninsured but are increasingly misinsured. They may have protection for individual assets or events but remain exposed to the dependencies and interconnected risks that drive many modern losses.

Pavlos Spyropoulos, Regional Managing Director, TMK Asia, said: "Many organisations understand where their physical assets are and insure them accordingly. What is often less visible are the dependencies that keep those assets operating, whether that is a supplier, a logistics hub, a technology provider, or critical infrastructure. When those dependencies fail, losses can emerge in ways businesses may not expect."

‘Priced but not Understood’ highlights how some of Asia Pacific's largest losses now arise through interconnected risks rather than direct physical damage. A cyber incident can halt production, a supplier outage can disrupt manufacturing across multiple countries, and the closure of a major transport hub can trigger widespread business interruption despite no damage to an insured asset.

Recent events have demonstrated how disruption can spread rapidly through interconnected systems. The 2024 CrowdStrike-related IT outages disrupted airlines, banks, healthcare providers, retailers and manufacturers worldwide after a failure at a single technology provider affected around 8.5 million systems. The incident is estimated to have caused US$5.4 billion of direct losses to Fortune 500 companies alone.

The 2024 Taiwan earthquake showed the concentration risk embedded within global semiconductor supply chains, with Taiwan producing more than 60% of global semiconductors and more than 90% of advanced chips.

As a result, economic losses increasingly exceed insured losses, even in markets where insurance is readily available.

Pavlos Spyropoulos continued: "Businesses can find themselves exposed not because insurance capacity is unavailable, but because losses develop differently from the assumptions on which many insurance products were originally designed. The market has expanded capacity, improved access, and developed new products, but the risk has evolved faster than many of the frameworks used to assess it."

The white paper argues that traditional boundaries between risk categories and insurance products are becoming increasingly blurred as supply chains become more interconnected, reliance on technology deepens, and geopolitical uncertainty becomes harder to predict.

Where risks span multiple areas, coverage may not always respond in the ways organisations expect. Businesses can discover that losses fall between policies or arise from dependencies that were not fully recognised when cover was arranged.

The paper concludes that insurance remains an important part of resilience, but it cannot fully address exposures that businesses do not understand. Organisations also need greater visibility of their critical dependencies and a clearer understanding of how disruption could affect their business.

Pavlos Spyropoulos concluded: "Businesses cannot manage today's risks by looking at individual exposures in isolation. Some of the largest losses increasingly emerge through the connections between assets, suppliers, technology, and infrastructure. Understanding those connections is becoming just as important as protecting against them."

The findings reflect themes TMK has observed through two decades of underwriting in Asia Pacific, where losses increasingly develop across multiple classes, geographies and dependencies rather than as isolated events. Recognising how these risks interact has been a central consideration in the development of the company's underwriting and product approach across the region.

ENDS

About Tokio Marine Kiln

Tokio Marine Kiln is a leading specialist insurance underwriting business operating in the Lloyd’s insurance market. Through our operations in the UK, US (Tokio Marine Highland) and Asia Pacific, and as part of one of the world’s largest insurance groups, Tokio Marine, we protect customers around the world against complex and ever-changing risks. We have eight underwriting teams focused on Property & Motor; Liability; Aviation; Cyber & Enterprise Risk; Marine & Energy; Special Risks; Portfolio Solutions and Specialty Reinsurance, which are complemented by our “outstanding” Claims service. Together we enable our clients to fulfil their ambitions for a better tomorrow. Tokio Marine Kiln’s Lloyd’s syndicates benefit from an AM Best rating of A+ (Superior) and AA- (Very Strong) from S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings. For more information, visit www.tmkiln.com.

Tokio Marine Kiln Syndicates Limited (incorporated and registered in England and Wales with registration number 00729671 and whose registered office is at 20 Fenchurch Street, London EC3M 3BY) is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority (with FCA register reference number 204909).