Industry Insights Vol IV, Issue 4

In this Section

Cryptocurrency Insurance: A Growing Opportunity In A Rapidly Evolving Market
Robo Risks: What The Insurance Industry Needs To Know Now
Total Commissions And Fees (TC&F): A Benchmark Metric To Measure Growth

Cryptocurrency Insurance: A Growing Opportunity In A Rapidly Evolving Market

Today, the global cryptocurrency (“crypto”) market has reached a staggering $4 trillion in capitalization.¹ This growth is being fueled not only by retail investors but also by the recent launch of crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which have opened the door to significant institutional capital.

Cryptos are digital tokens, and with the continued maturation of digital tokens into an asset class, they are increasingly being viewed as legitimate investment vehicles rather than speculative instruments.

Market legitimacy of crypto fuels regulatory momentum

The launch of multiple crypto ETFs has driven market legitimacy and adoption. In 2024 a number of ETFs saw great success: BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) drew $70 billion in total assets, and its Ethereum fund reached $10 billion in assets within its first year post-launch. More recently, ETFs for Litecoin, Solana, and Hedera became available to investors.² Large investment brokerage firms are also offering their clients access to crypto. For example, Fidelity offers its own Bitcoin ETF (Fidelity Advantage Bitcoin ETF).

However, regulations are increasing. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 (The CLARITY Act), passed by the House in July 2025 and currently being considered by the Senate, aims to create clear rules for the crypto industry. Greater regulation is likely to increase the sense of legitimacy for crypto, theoretically by reducing risk – and potentially boosting broader adoption of crypto. This may open up more attractive opportunities for insurers.

What exactly is crypto insurance?

When most people think of crypto losses, they think of drops in value. No one is insuring against that. Instead, the emerging crypto insurance market is focused on losses due to custodial error and a variety of hacking/theft possibilities. Here are three emerging categories of cryptocurrency insurance:

Theft and hacking coverage. Protects against loss of digital assets stored in exchanges or offline “cold wallets.”
Custodial insurance. Covers losses due to errors, negligence, or breaches by digital asset custodians.
Crime insurance. Shields businesses and individuals from insider threats, including employee fraud or theft.

Rising demand for crypto insurance

By 2026, nearly one billion people are projected to hold crypto assets. However, 89% of these holders remain uninsured. Encouragingly, 42% of the uninsured say they would purchase coverage, and another 26% would consider it. With over two-thirds of the uninsured market expressing interest, there is a clear and growing demand for crypto insurance.

Standard Chartered, a British multinational investment bank, forecasts that the total crypto market cap could reach $10 trillion by the end of 2026. This explosive growth could further accelerate the need for robust insurance solutions tailored to digital assets.

While the crypto insurance market is still in its early stages, several traditional insurers have begun offering coverage, often through surplus lines or specialty markets since the risks remain complex and are still emerging.

Chubb and AIG entered the crypto insurance market in 2018.³
AXA has offered insurance solutions for businesses in the digital asset space since 2019.⁴
Since 2020, several syndicates of Lloyd’s of London, including Atrium, Beazley and Canopius have been underwriting cryptocurrency risks.^{5, 6, 7}
In 2024, Marsh McLennan launched an insurance facility for digital asset custodians.

While the crypto market appears promising in its growth, there are challenging risks involved in insuring this complex sector. Theft and cybersecurity are major threats, as crypto exchanges and wallets are targeted by hackers. And significantly, from an insurance standpoint, there is limited historical loss data and claims history, making it difficult to effectively price risk.

The future opportunity for crypto insurance

The increasing regulatory clarity around crypto will likely drive the asset to reach mainstream adoption. The current U.S. administration has a pro-crypto and pro-innovation stance, enacting new executive orders and moving towards more comprehensive legislation.

The CLARITY Act could be a key driver in the crypto market’s quest to become more established. If passed by the Senate, it would classify certain digital assets as “investment contract assets” rather than securities, reducing legal ambiguity and making it easier for insurers to offer coverage. The bill would also provide a regulatory framework for digital assets and separate regulation between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).⁸

While the crypto insurance market faces real hurdles – including volatility, limited actuarial data, and evolving risks – it also presents significant opportunities. As digital assets become more integrated with traditional finance and institutional adoption grows, insurers that adapt early may benefit from a rapidly expanding market.

Robo Risks: What The Insurance Industry Needs To Know Now

As robotics and autonomous systems enter the mainstream — from driverless vehicles and warehouse bots to robotic surgery systems and even delivery drones — the insurance industry is being forced into a fundamental re-evaluation of risk. Historically, insurance has been priced around human fault. But what happens when humans are no longertaking the actions that lead to liability, no longer the ones “behind the wheel” both literally and figuratively?

When accidents do happen, automation introduces the probability of new systemic, software-driven losses and a shift in liability away from individuals and toward manufacturers, code developers and even data providers.

On the flip side, automated technology is widely expected to steadily (and significantly) reduce loss frequency in some domains. Put simply: automation promises fewer accidents, which means less need for certain types of traditional insurance.

A business built around human error

The core assumption of traditional insurance is simple: Human actions cause losses. Therefore, humans are liable, so humans pay premiums to cover their liability. Autonomous systems break that model because (at least in theory) they remove the possibility of human error from an industry that’s built on the possibility of human error.

For example, if a driverless car injures a pedestrian, fault (and therefore responsibility) may lie not with the car owner but with the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), the software company that wrote the code that controls the vehicle, the satellite company that’s supplying the GPS feed, a malevolent actor who hacks the system, or others. The question now becomes: “What caused the machine to do what it did?” The answer can be quite complex.

At the same time that this complexity is being introduced, analysts project that accident frequency could materially decline, disrupting the economics of certain types of liability insurance for decades to come.⁹ For example, McKinsey estimates that auto insurers could see up to 40% erosion in personal motor premium by 2040 as liability shifts from drivers to manufacturers.¹⁰

This is good news for public safety — and a potentially major challenge for insurers relying on private-passenger auto as a foundation for revenue.

The future of autonomous vehicles

The global autonomous-vehicle market is projected to grow from approximately $274B in 2025 to over $4.45T by 2034.¹¹ In parallel, the self-driving auto insurance market is expected to surge to $88.1B by 2032.¹²

This increase in demand for self-driving auto insurance is being driven by the need for:

Better product liability coverage
AI/algorithm errors & omissions insurance
Coverage of “cyber-physical” risk
Infrastructure and connectivity insurance

The ways in which liability becomes assigned will ultimately determine which lines dominate. Here are some scenarios:

Future Scenario	Primary Insured	Dominant Lines	Industry Result
Consumer still considered the vehicle “operator”	Driver	Personal auto	Gradual premium decline as accidents decline.
Manufacturer assumes negligence	OEM/Tech firm	Product liability + cyber	Less need for personal auto.
Shared liability	Shared	Hybrid models	Greater claims complexity.

Self-parking systems such as Hyundai’s Remote Smart Parking Assist (Smart Park) already remove human control at key decision points.¹³ If the system misjudges distance and collides with another vehicle, is the policyholder or the algorithm at fault? Regulators globally are drafting frameworks to prevent liability gaps, but rules remain inconsistent across states and countries. In China, BYD — the global leader in electric vehicle sales — publicly pledged to cover all damages caused by its autonomous-parking system, an early indication that OEMs may increasingly assume liability for automated driving features.¹⁴

Deloitte recently noted that cyber and product liability exposures will rise materially as autonomy continues to scale into commercial services.¹⁵

What this means for insurance overall and individual brokers in particular

Increasingly, claims adjustment will require skills that look more like aviation safety analysis than traditional adjusting. Coverage investigations are already highly technical, including reviews of telemetry and algorithm logs, firmware versioning, sensor-data forensics, OTA (over-the-air) software update history, and more. And brokers will play a vital advisory role as the issues connected with robo-risks continue to emerge. Here’s a short list of the more high-profile developments brokers should be monitoring:

Premium migration. From personal, to product liability, to cyber/tech errors and omissions.
Regulatory frameworks for “who is the operator?” This will have a major influence on client profile and required coverage.
Growth in correlated systemic exposures. A single software flaw could trigger tens of thousands of simultaneous losses.
Insurer-OEM collaboration. Embedded insurance and OEM-provided coverage models are emerging.
Data access. Ability to access data for forensics purposes will become a significant underwriting consideration.

It’s clear that robo-risks won’t eliminate insurance — they’ll redefine it. Insurers must now prepare for a future in which premium pools expand rapidly in some markets while shrinking in others. Automation promises safety but introduces accountability questions that only those with insurance expertise are equipped to solve. The ones who adapt early will set themselves up to lead the industry into a new generation of coverage.

Total Commissions And Fees (TC&F): A Benchmark Metric To Measure Growth

In the fast-evolving insurance landscape, brokerage owners face mounting pressures to optimize performance, retain clients, and stay competitive. Understanding the performance of each team member, along with how their performance compares to industry benchmarks, can make goal-setting more impactful and motivate staff to improve performance.

MarshBerry has identified several Critical Performance Indicators (CPIs) – ratios that reveal a firm’s true operational health. One key CPI firms should be using to track growth and performance is Total Commissions and Fees (TC&F).

This metric is broken out by total growth rate, TC&F per production person, and TC&F per service person. These metrics offer insight into revenue driven purely by the sale of insurance products, as opposed to total revenue, which encompasses all sources of income. Here are the ways insurance brokerage leaders should use the three TC&F breakouts to benefit their business.

TC&F per producer and per service person

Productivity is a key area that insurance brokerage firms constantly seek to increase. Looking at TC&F metrics can help identify what’s working — and what needs work. For example, are certain lines of business or specific products generating high commissions but draining resources? Do producers need better training, resources, or mentoring to increase sales efficiencies or redirect their focus? Leadership can use the insights taken from a TC&F analysis to identify patterns, reallocate resources, and make data-driven decisions. This can improve operational health, focus strategic planning, and advance competitive benchmarking. The chart below, showing producer performance for average and Best 25% of firms, can help evaluate individual performance.

The TC&F metric is valuable not only as a stand-alone measurement of the revenue producers bring in, but it can compare TC&F per service person against the average and best of the industry. This comparison can help confirm if service team workloads are too high or too light. Higher is better, but too high can indicate inadequate staffing, leading to burnout or turnover. Like producers, service personnel performance can be compared to industry results for the average and Best 25% of firms.

In cases of higher-than-average books of business, consider investing in a small business unit, virtual assistants, or an outsourcing service that can take over time-consuming tasks. But if the numbers show that their workload is lighter than service teams of similarly sized firms, that could signal a different problem. First determine if underperformance is the result of something the firm needs to fix — such as a poorly designed process, technology shortcomings, or training limitations — before addressing it as an individual performance problem.

Compare against industry growth rate

In addition to tracking individual staff member performance, TC&F can reveal growth in a firm over time. The TC&F growth rate tracks the year-over-year percentage increase (or decrease) in the total income generated from both commissions and fees. A positive growth rate occurs when a firm sells more policies, expands its client base, or increases its service fees. Investors and acquirers often look at this growth rate to assess the firm’s financial health and future potential.

This metric can demonstrate both how well the firm is growing its income streams from selling and serving clients as well as how effectively the firm is adapting to market shifts; for example, by offering higher-margin products or diversifying revenue sources. According to data from MarshBerry’s proprietary financial management system Perspectives for High Performance (PHP), the Best 25% of firms (based on their financial performance, specifically organic growth) have generated roughly double the growth rate of average firms – a stark difference.

Several factors influence the TC&F growth rate. Naturally, the number of policies sold is primary, but also growth in client acquisition or retention, offering an array of insurance products (e.g., health, life, property & casualty) with varying commission rates, adding fee-based services, such as consulting, risk management, or administrative services will all boost this metric.

Take action from TC&F results

A negative or lower TC&F metric may be caused by in-house performance problems, but it can also be a sign of something outside the firm’s control, such as regulatory changes to commission levels, or a softening market. If a brokerage determines that external factors are not the source of a performance shortfall, leaders can address underperformance by exploring changes in:

Technology and automation: Digital platforms can improve efficiency, enabling brokers to handle more clients and policies.
Strategic partnerships and M&A: Acquiring smaller firms or forming alliances can rapidly increase commission and fee income.
Revenue initiatives: Cross-selling additional policies to existing clients and shifting toward higher-margin products can boost both commissions and fees.
Staff adjustments: Outsourcing tasks that are not client-facing and removing or reassigning underperformers can help maximize productivity.

By measuring TC&F consistently, firms gain clarity on where the business is headed and how to steer it more effectively.

In a competitive industry it’s essential for companies to take advantage of any data that can help improve performance and drive growth. Choosing the right key performance indicators can produce insights that transform a business from average to top performer. With 2026 right around the corner, these TC&F metrics can play a key role in strategic planning — for the new year and beyond.

Sources:

In This Issue

Focused Insights: Receding Tides: How Will Market Softening Impact Valuations And M&A?

U.S. Macroeconomic Indicators

M&A Market Update

Public Broker Performance