The golden age of the insurance industry is yet to happen, according to Willis Group Holdings chairman and CEO Joe Plumeri.Mr Plumeri, who was the keynote speaker on the first day of the Insurance Day Summit held at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess yesterday, said that a number of governments and businesses across the world were no longer sustainable, providing a big opportunity for re/insurers, and particularly the Bermuda market.Citing the example of the US government, he highlighted the issues it faced as a going concern and the increasingly important role the re/insurance industry had to play in the future.“Nothing happens without us,” he said. “We have to understand every industry that exists today is because every industry needs us to exist.“This whole idea of commercial sustainability not only relates to companies, it relates to countries and that relates to how we play a bigger part.“This Island is going to become a bigger deal simply because it is going to be allowed to be a bigger deal.”Mr Plumeri said that the world’s atmosphere was changing significantly with the need for insurance coming to the fore in light of the recent spate of global natural disasters.Predicting future catastrophe loss years, he said the lack of a US national catastrophe programme and other such initiatives presented further opportunities for the insurance industry.Meanwhile, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill had exposed the US government’s inexperience and lack of financial wherewithal to deal with such issues, said Mr Plumeri.He added that insurance was the one sector that had survived the recession fully intact.“None of us went out of business during the great recession,” he said. “Everybody kept writing insurance. This industry never got the credit once (for its resilience).“Nobody ever said when the banks were going under that not one of us didn’t pay a claim. That’s why I believe that with the right kind of dream and plan we will be able to sustain what some governments and businesses can’t.”Pointing to a rapidly expanding middle class, Mr Plumeri said that Bermuda also had a bigger part to play in asset growth.He said that the emerging countries like China and India, which will require 14 cities of the size of New York City to be built by 2030 if they continue to grow at the same rate, were another market to be capitalised on.“I think that the golden age of insurance has not yet happened,” he said.“I think for those of us in this business we have not even seen (the full capability) what we can do yet.“The demand for insurance will explode as countries around the world have to provide for a knowledgeable emerging middle class.”Among some of the requirements of the 21st century will be more and better housing, transportation, agriculture and healthcare, all of which need re/insurance protection and which the industry has the expertise, experience and capacity to provide for, said Mr Plumeri.Describing the future of re/insurance as “electrifying”, he added that he was being conservative in his projections and anything was possible.“You have no idea what opportunities we have in this business if we concentrate yourselves on the vision, we understand the markets and our place in the world and the sustainable things that we need to provide for governments and companies,” he said.“The world is going to depend on us. I think this (insurance) is going to become even bigger and more popular than before.”