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The insurance industry faces a “golden age” of opportunity thanks to booming growth in the so called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies, Joe Plumeri has predicted.

In a keynote speech at an insurance conference in Bermuda, the Willis chairman and CEO said two billion people from the burgeoning BRIC economies were set to join an emerging global middle class in the next 20 years.

He said: “Over the course of the 21st century, the wealth and insurable value that the exploding global middle class will create will be unprecedented in history. The resulting global demand for insurance will dwarf the capital and capacity of today’s insurance market.”

The golden age of insurance will also be spurred by developments in more mature Western economies, Plumeri said, particularly in the US where economic troubles are reducing the government’s appetite for public insurance.

Citing talk of a scaling back of the Terrorism backstop and the unsustainability of the National Flood Insurance Program, Plumeri said that, “As the public sector inevitably retreats, opportunities will be created for the insurance industry in many areas.”