Marsh and McLennan chief executive officer Dan Glaser says the insurance market is generally softening and he expects price competition to heat up during this year.

Speaking with AMBestTV’s Meg Green at the Insurance Information Institute’s Property/Casualty Joint Industry Forum in New York, the leader of the major global insurance and reinsurance broker identified plentiful expansion opportunities for the industry.

“There’s plenty of insurance companies and there’s a lot of competition, but there’s probably not enough coverage and service competition and so therefore, price competition really comes to the fore,” Mr Glaser said.

“My expectation is we’ll see even more of that in 2014, with significant levels of rate and price competition.

“I think in general this market is softening as a result of excess capital in the business, so I would say this is an insurance company-driven softening as opposed to driven by brokers or clients.”

Asked about expansion opportunities, Mr Glaser said: “I would say first off there’s large areas of exposure which are not adequately covered today. You know, areas such as cyber risk, privacy-type both on a personal and a corporate basis, flood, terrorism, are all examples of where I think the industry could actually write more risk.

“Other areas, as an example as well, the whole burgeoning field in biotechnology or the shale gas revolution. There’s a tremendous ability for the industry to expand the pie.”