A reinsurance firm has axed or transferred a total of seven jobs after a decision to close its underwriting office in Bermuda.

It is thought five jobs have gone, with two staff being offered positions elsewhere in the Hardy Group’s international network of insurance and reinsurance offices.

But Hardy will continue to be domiciled on the Island, even though it will no longer offer underwriting.

A spokeswoman for the company said: “Hardy confirms that, following a strategic business review, the board has taken the decision to cease underwriting business from its Bermuda office. The domicile of the group will remain unchanged.”

She added: “The decision will simplify Hardy’s business without affecting its ability to fully service existing and future business and enable Hardy to focus on opportunities in London and Singapore in support of its strategic future growth plans — arrangements have been made to manage all policies previously underwritten in Bermuda.”

Hardy did not specify whether the lost jobs were held by Bermudians or non-Bermudians.

Business expert Peter Everson said: “Bermuda is in a global competition for jobs and the reason coming more to the fore than ten years ago is the reliability of and relative cheapness of international telecoms and data.

“Twenty years ago, wherever the chief executive officer sat, you had to have a cluster of senior staff and subsidiaries. Now that data is now cheaply transported around the world without corruption, you don’t need to have your chief financial officer next to you.”

Mr Everson added that loss of jobs meant a knock-on effect on Government tax income, spending on the Island on goods, services and rent, as well as empty office space.

And he said: “It’s serious for Bermuda — it shows we have to work extremely hard to retain the jobs we have got and to create new ones because we can’t assume the jobs in Bermuda today will stay in Bermuda forever.

“That’s why efficiency is so important and why the Government has insisted Government has to be efficient because if it pushes costs up, that will cost jobs in Bermuda.”

Bradley Kading, president and executive director of the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers, said that jobs in the sector had fallen by 193 posts since the peak of 2007 to 2012 and that 77 job losses were recorded year on year between 2011 and last year.

He added: “We are concerned about a trend of job losses.”

But he said: “Bermuda is still a pretty healthy underwriting centre in certain classes of business.”

Mr Kading added that a new survey of the sector would be carried out in the spring.

The Association of Bermuda International Companies (ABIC) declined to comment.

Bermuda College senior lecturer in economics Craig Simmons said: “The insurance space is going through considerable innovation — innovation leads to disruption in the traditional ways of doing business.

“As an offshore financial centre, Bermuda must continue to to meet the needs of its customer base or lose market share to our competitors.”

He added that the Island had to ask if it was meeting the needs of its customers — and said that the recently-published “Reinsurance 2020: Breaking the Mould” report “there is evidence of success in the Bermuda market”.

Earlier this year, reinsurance firm PartnerRe announced that eight Bermuda jobs would go as a result of global restructuring which saw 140 redundancies worldwide.

The jobs lost were in corporate communications, human resources, finance and the legal department and were described by the firm as “support function roles”.

Before the cuts, PartnerRe had a total of 81 staff in Bermuda, with more than three-quarters of them Bermudian, spouses of Bermudians or permanent residents.