The Risks Reshaping 2026

C-suite perspectives point to financial volatility today and technology risks shaping the future

BY SOA STAFF May 2026

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The Emerging Risk Survey has become a cornerstone initiative of the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute and the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS), offering a yearly snapshot of the most pressing risks facing the insurance and financial services industries. The 19th annual survey had more than 350 respondents. In addition, more than 100 of those responses came from C-suite and executive-level professionals, who provided their unique insights into both current and future emerging risks.

The report was co-authored by SOA Research Institute Managing Director R. Dale Hall, FSA, CERA, MAAA, and Michael Bean, FSA, FCAS, FCIA, CERA, PhD. The Actuary recently spoke with Hall about the survey and its latest findings.

What is different in the 19th Annual Emerging Risk Survey compared to previous years?

R. Dale Hall: For the first time, we gathered a subset of responses from C-suite and other executive thought leaders.

We also reviewed the list of risks that we have asked about in previous surveys. For example:

• Are the risks in the list that we’ve been using over the last five or six years the ones that people want to comment on today?
• Are there any risks that have grown to be duplicative?

We developed a list with a set of 17 risks that we thought were most descriptive and most common. About a dozen of those are carryovers from previous years. Some risks were updated with new terminology or broadened a bit. We added specific economic risks. We didn’t want to change the list dramatically and lose the longitudinal history of the survey, but we also knew there were new and emerging risks, especially regarding technology, that we wanted to capture. For example, instead of referring to disruptive technology, we now use more specific language, such as the risk of adverse outcomes from artificial intelligence (AI).

This year, in addition to asking about global economic growth, we also asked about economic growth in local markets. For instance, we asked for respondents’ views on employment growth in their local economies, including expectations for rising unemployment and inflation. So, we tried to gather a wider range of economic variables that C-suite risk managers would use in their forward projections or in risk scenarios.

What are some of the notable findings from the 19th Annual Emerging Risk Survey?

Hall: First, when considering current risks to their organizations in 2026, economic and geopolitical risks were very dominant with C-suite respondents. In fact, if you add those two types of risk categories together, 60% of these respondents said that something in the economic and geopolitical risk categories would be most impactful. For specific risks within those categories, many respondents chose greater-than-normal financial volatility. Because we’re in a world experiencing geoeconomic shifts, it’s sometimes difficult to pull apart the economic risks from the geopolitical risks.

We also asked about emerging risks, which are generally risks that companies may consider beyond their normal budgeting process and often have the potential to occur three or more years into the future. Respondents indicated technological risks are a common concern. While C-suite risk managers are adjusting their current financial projections and budgets over the next 12 or 18 months, they are also worried about the risks that could impact their organization’s strategy in the future. That’s where technological risk comes into play. The specific technological risk of AI adverse outcomes was certainly a top choice among the C-suite respondents.

The survey also asks about risks that have an impact if they were to happen in combination with other risks, and the technological risk category dominated there as well. The combination could entail risk events happening at the same time or sequentially. The technological risk category dominated in the C-suite responses, specifically cyber risk events combined with adverse AI outcomes.

What are some notable differences in responses across practice areas?

Hall: When we split C-suite responses by practice, we found that property and casualty leaders focused more on environmental risks than life insurance leaders, who expressed more worries about economic risks, specifically greater-than-normal financial volatility.

However, when asking C-suite respondents to consider emerging risks three or more years into the future, concern about technological risks, such as those associated with AI, became more universal across practices. This includes responses from leaders employed by actuarial and financial/auditing consulting firms, which makes sense because many of their consulting arrangements support technological transformation.

“AI adverse outcomes” is the top emerging risk in 2026 with the full group of respondents (C-Suite plus risk managers). Why do you think it is more top of mind this year?

Hall: Every day, AI becomes more prominent in the actuarial profession and in the world in general. We saw the triggering of an inflection point in 2022, when OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT, and in 2023, findings from the Emerging Risk Survey saw disruptive technology as a more front-running emerging risk. Over time, this technology has been integrated into our daily business activities as an essential set of tools. So, as AI has become an everyday tool in the workplace, the actuarial profession appropriately recognizes its potential risks if it’s not used with proper governance and risk management.

For the first time in years, “climate risks” didn’t make the Top Five Emerging Risks list, per the responses from the full group. Why has this risk category dropped off?

Hall: Climate risk continues to be a top-rated emerging risk, but it’s not as high on the list maybe because, in recent years, we’ve become better at modeling impacts from weather events, such as catastrophe modeling of hurricanes and wildfires. The risks themselves haven’t been solved but we understand them better. Things that we can’t model as well are the risks that jump up in the emerging risks list.

Other risks might be crowding out climate risks, too. There’s a theory, psychic numbing, that humans can digest only so many bad things at one time. It describes how people worry less about older risks as new ones emerge. A related concept, the finite pool of worry (from risk perception research by Paul Slovic and others), suggests people have limited emotional capacity for threats. When one risk captures attention, concern for others tends to fade.

It also may be due to recency bias. For instance, in North America, for the first time in 10 years, we didn’t have a hurricane make landfall in the continental U.S. Also, we conducted the survey in January 2026, so other world events in fall 2025 and into the new year likely took hold of risk managers’ minds more than climate.

What are some findings about respondents’ outlook on key economic variables in 2026?

Hall: In our general survey population, including both industry leadership and risk managers, responses across the economic variables we looked at (for instance, global and domestic economic growth and inflation) were predominantly moderate. About 60% anticipate moderate inflation, and there is a nearly equal portion on either side of that: About 22% of respondents expect high inflation and 18% expect weak inflation. These findings are similar to World Economic Forum surveys of chief economists, who think inflation may stay at moderate levels compared to previous historical observations.

One thing that stood out was the slightly negative outlook for the labor market. About 53% of respondents anticipated a weak labor market, 41% expected it to be moderate, and 6% strong.

What are the implications for the insurance industry of these findings about economic risks?

Hall: With not-too-hot, not-too-cold expectations for the economy, we wouldn’t anticipate a sudden upsurge in demand for insurance coverage, but we can anticipate stable demand and growth in these markets. Similarly, the moderate economic outlook may mean we won’t see large numbers of people lapsing on insurance policies.

Despite the dominant survey response anticipating moderate growth, there were some that predicted weakness in the near future, like in the labor market and with economic growth expectations. If there are expectations for a weaker economy, insurance companies tend to build that into their economic planning.

What are the relationships between the risks most often chosen as the most impactful in 2026 and those chosen as most impactful in three or more years?

Hall: It’s helpful to ask about the most impactful risks in 2026 in the near-term while also asking about risks that impact future strategies. This is how we could determine the stickiest risks, those that are of concern both today and three years or more into the future.

We found that the technology risk category has the highest persistence. Of the C-suite respondents who selected technological risks as most impactful today, 76% also chose it as being very impactful three or more years into the future.

On the other hand, respondents who are concerned about geopolitical risks today chose a variety of different future risks. In fact, only 24% of C-suite respondents who picked geopolitical as the most impactful risk in 2026 also chose it as the most impactful three or more years into the future.

Why is it important to identify trends in how risks emerge? Why is the Emerging Risk Survey an important tool for risk managers?

Hall: Identifying trends and how risks emerge is instructive for people whose day-to-day role involves enterprise risk management. When I was using this type of report in practice, it was helpful either to validate whether I was directionally right about the risks I should be modeling and checking against for my enterprise risk management response or to reveal that the ideas were caught in a silo. Learning what the rest of the risk management world is thinking can help prevent silos.

It’s also important to help build best practices into risk management. There are many scenarios that don’t account for risk combinations, so seeing the trends is important. It’s also human nature to be influenced by current headlines, so it’s important to identify how risks emerge to elucidate the range of possibilities that might be out there on the horizon. Many organizations spend a lot of time focusing on what happened to their results this month or this quarter or, maybe, this year. But best practice in enterprise risk management is to look at risks that might have a huge impact on the enterprise value of the organization in the future. So, identifying emerging risk trends can give risk managers a wider lens on the types of scenarios they should consider when practicing good enterprise risk management.

While participation has historically been concentrated in North America, the SOA Research Institute has begun to conduct surveys in other global markets, starting with India, providing broader insight into how perspectives on current and emerging risks vary by region. These differences underscore how risk is often shaped by one’s vantage point.

Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and
are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries or the respective authors’ employers.

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