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The one-two punch of stubbornly high interest rates and prolonged inflation has severely impacted supply chains in recent years. And they continue to impact the ability of logistics providers and other supply chain-oriented businesses to obtain insurance in 2026.
Interest rates are still relatively high compared with just a few years ago, but are starting to come down, observes Jeffrey Lang, president of retail property and casualty with private insurance brokerage Venbrook Group LLC. Elevated rates don’t just affect borrowing, he notes. They translate into operational risk for logistics providers on a number of fronts, including pressure on market value, general volatility, and lengthier retention of fleets and equipment. That last trend heightens the possibility of equipment breakdowns and longer downtime — potentially disastrous for companies with limited liquidity and thin profit margins.
Lang suggested that some businesses might still be feeling the effects of the January, 2025, fires in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, as they confront a tripling or even quadrupling of the price of labor, lumber and other materials needed to rebuild. While that situation “has since calmed down a little bit,” global prices for concrete, lumber and steel remain at a premium due to continued inflation.
The travails of supply chains are causing top executives to focus more on resilience and agility. “They want to be prepared more, in case one of their suppliers goes down,” Lang says. Insurance underwriters, for their part, are asking more questions about the redundancy of their customers’ supply chains, and the strength of their business-continuity plans. In some cases, that’s prompting a refusal to renew the policies of logistics providers.
“It’s not local to one insurance company, region or industry,” Lang explains. “It’s down to specific clients.” As underwriters deploy artificial intelligence in their claims adjusting, policy holders are being required to reduce time to recovery from any type of major disruption.
“If they can’t get up and running within a certain amount of time, it’s reasonable [for underwriters] to ask: ‘Do we really want this on our balance sheet?’” Lang says.
How, then, can logistics providers and other supply chain businesses prove their agility to a nervous insurance carrier? Lang says contingency planning is becoming an increasingly important part of the underwriting process. In particular, insurance companies look at whether a company is rethinking its sourcing strategies in the form of nearshoring, reshoring back to the U.S. or building supplier redundancy into its network.
That said, discussions about supply chain risk in 2026 aren’t just driven by concerns over insurance. Businesses today are talking about capital resilience, continuity, sourcing, technology and asset lifecycles. “These are words that have never been as prevalent as they were at the end of 2025 and into 2026,” Lang says.
As insurance companies become more adept at taking care of their balance sheets, Lang sees brokers acting more as capital advisers than just policy shoppers. At such a time, parametric risk — whereby policy holders aren’t necessarily indemnified for the full loss from an event — comes to the fore. And capital expenditure “becomes a common discussion, almost on a daily basis.”
The supply chain industry experiences regular cycles of consolidation and expansion in the number of players in the market. Entering 2026, Lang believes mergers and acquisitions in that sector “are going to tick up a little bit.” At the same time, “people are hunting more with lasers than with shotguns these days, as businesses consider issues of culture in addition to assessing balance sheets.”
The big logistics merger story of the moment is the proposed combination of the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern railways, a deal valued at around $85 billion. But Lang doesn’t expect to see similar consolidations occurring in other transportation modes, especially aviation, where there’s currently a move away from large aircraft manufacturers to regional carriers.
As with virtually every aspect of life today, AI is dominating the conversation when it comes to trends in logistics, transportation and the supply chain in general. But Lang says it should be approached with care. “Technology reduces exposures and risk,” he says, “but creates new ones.” In underwriting, for example, AI can reduce human error and improve overall governance. Yet pursuing those efficiencies without proper controls “just shifts risk from one [area] to another, creating contractual liability that folks might not be prepared for.”
In 2026, Lang believes the purchase of insurance isn’t just about transferring risk. “It’s about understanding how capital, operations and resilience all intersect, and become part of the insurance process.” Buyers won’t necessarily be looking for the cheapest premium, as they exhibit less tolerance for surprise coverage gaps or exclusions. “It’s up to us as insurance providers to respond,” he says.
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