As emerging technologies and shifting capital flows reshape the insurance landscape, HUB International’s Matthew Studley (pictured) is seeing a common demand from larger, more sophisticated clients: they want to understand not just what is happening, but how the market works.
In a recent conversation with Insurance Business, Studley – president of HUB International’s Ontario and Atlantic regions – pointed to artificial intelligence (AI) as a powerful new source of risk and opportunity, and described how a capital‑markets lens helps him explain insurance cycles to boards and executives.
Studley says many organizations are encountering a cluster of emerging exposures they simply didn’t have to think deeply about five or 10 years ago, and that AI sits at the top of that list.
“Artificial intelligence is probably the cleanest example,” he said. “If you go back five years, how many customers were really thinking about some of the technology and privacy risks to their ultimate customers, in a scenario where they were going to be putting agentic AI solutions across every single employee’s desktop?”
For professional services firms and other knowledge-based businesses, he sees AI tools as both a productivity accelerant and a material new liability.
That adds a layer of complexity, and especially for those in the professional services space, it’s a huge opportunity, he said.
“But it also comes with a new risk that, frankly, very few people are well versed in, across the insurance community in total, let alone at any individual firm.”
The pace of change means new insurance products are emerging quickly, but the number of practitioners with real depth in the exposure and the wording can be limited. For risk managers and boards, that can make buying decisions harder, not easier.
Studley argues that this is where genuine specialization – not just marketing language – starts to matter for clients trying to navigate unfamiliar territory.
“Industry specialization was why I joined HUB 15 years ago,” he said. “While it’s become a talking point for a lot of insurance advisors and insurance brokers now, there’s quite a big difference between firms with decades of experience in something and hiring one person and trying to say you have expertise.”
In his view, organizations facing AI‑driven change or other new risks are looking for more than a policy placement. They want a counterpart who understands their sector, the coverage and the way those two intersect.
Clients are always searching for a balance of expert advice in their sector, expert advice in the product, and strong relationship management skills, he said. The goal, he added, is that they get “ease of use” and a process for talking through risks they can accept.
For Studley, that combination of technical depth and relationship skills is what turns a broker from a transaction facilitator into a long‑term advisor, particularly when the risk itself is evolving.
Beyond new technologies, Studley says many of HUB’s larger clients want a clearer picture of why the insurance market behaves the way it does – why capacity floods in at certain times and evaporates at others, and how that plays out in pricing and terms.
“To me, the insurance market is fairly similar to the capital markets,” said Studley, who spent time on the asset‑management side earlier in his career. “There’s cyclicality – there’s situations where capital comes in, and there’s too much capital… There are times where capital contracts, and of course, that drives ultimately different behaviour from the insurers – as do interest rates.”
With risk‑management teams, CFOs and boards, he finds that mapping those cycles explicitly can change how they think about their programs.
The aim is not to forecast every twist and turn, but to make the mechanics more transparent so buyers can make deliberate choices about limits, structure and timing – rather than treating each renewal as an isolated event.
“The more we can educate our clients about how what we do can help them, the better we will do as they do well,” Studley said.
“Because then the clients will see the value from our advice relative to some of our peers who just can’t have the same conversations because they don’t have the same level of experience technical capability or resources.”
