This article examines whether parametric insurance products fall within the legal definition of a “contract of insurance” under English law. It analyses common law principles, statutory frameworks, and regulatory interpretations, contrasting these with the flexible structure of parametric products. The paper explores implications for the legal concepts of risk transfer and insurable interest, and for regulatory compliance, highlighting the tension between innovation and legal certainty.

The doctrine of utmost good faith and the correlative duty of disclosure have governed insurance contract law for centuries on the foundational premise that the insured possesses superior information about the risk being transferred and must volunteer it to the insurer. Artificial intelligence, big data analytics, real-time sensor data, digital twin technology, parametric structures and distributed ledger technology are, for the first time in the history of the industry, systematically inverting or neutralising that asymmetry. This article argues that the resulting shift is not merely a technological disruption to insurance products and processes but a potential watershed in the conceptual foundations of insurance law itself. The article traces the historical pattern by which common law principles, tort liability and insurance market practice have together filled the governance vacuum that has consistently preceded formal regulatory intervention across successive waves of technological change. It examines how the technologies now transforming the industry are reconfiguring the informational relationship between insurer and insured across five principal domains and considers whether that historical holding pattern remains adequate when the informational architecture it has always depended upon is itself being inverted. The analysis is conducted with English law as its primary frame of reference, drawing on Australian, European and comparative material where it assists.

RSA v Equitas will be of interest to the reinsurance market due to the scarcity of case law in this area, and for its consideration of a number of key issues of interest. The judgment addresses a number of areas, including whether underlying defence costs erode the reinsurance excess; whether the claims co-operation wording circumscribed the follow the settlements clause, and whether the reinsured took proper and businesslike steps in settling. Whilst some of the law applied and conclusions reached are unsurprising, in other areas there is some pause for thought.

The ongoing digitalisation of the insurance market is reshaping the functional architecture of the insurance contract and generating new challenges for the law of information obligations. The deployment of algorithmic underwriting techniques, the availability of extensive and heterogeneous datasets and the pervasive use of predictive analytics have significantly altered the traditional informational asymmetries underpinning the common law duty of disclosure and its modern articulation in the Insurance Act 2015. Within this transformed environment, the information duty can no longer be understood as a unilateral obligation of the assured. The article argues that it should be reframed as a relational principle, generating bilateral obligations of transparency, intelligibility and accountability. This argument is developed primarily by reference to English law and the UK regulatory framework. These domestic instruments are, however, imperfectly adapted to the specific challenges of algorithmic opacity, and the article identifies the lacunae that remain. In this context, recent European regulatory developments – including the EU AI Act, DORA, Solvency II and IFRS 17 – are examined not as directly applicable law but as normative reference points that illuminate the direction of a mature regulatory response and that UK regulators and courts may legitimately draw upon in the interpretive development of the existing domestic framework.