Cambiaso Risso: Hormuz Risk 'Very High' for Shipping

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Amanda Bjork, Head of Claims at Cambiaso Risso Asia, told Bloomberg on March 26, 2026 that the security risk in the Strait of Hormuz is "very high," underscoring immediate and measurable pressure on marine insurance markets. Her comments were delivered from the sidelines of Asia-Pacific Maritime 2026 and reflect a consensus among specialist brokers that exposure for vessels transiting the Gulf has moved from elevated to critical. The Strait of Hormuz remains a systemic choke point: it conveys roughly 20% of global seaborne oil exports (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2024), making any escalation economically consequential beyond the shipping sector. Market participants are reacting through rerouting, higher war-risk surcharges and tightened cover terms; these adjustments are already visible in broker market checks and Lloyd's List intelligence for March 2026. This article dissects the data driving those reactions, compares current market dynamics with recent precedents, and outlines near-term implications for insurers, shipowners and corporates with trade exposure.

Context

Cambiaso Risso is a major global marine and reinsurance broker with deep market access in war-risk underwriting; Amanda Bjork's quoted assessment on March 26, 2026 gained traction because the firm sits at the nexus of claims flow and risk placement. Her description of the risk level as "very high" is shorthand for a cluster of operational realities: increased missile and drone activity reported in Gulf waters, elevated naval presence, and rising incidence of near-miss events that by industry convention trigger the reclassification of voyage risk. The Bloomberg video (Bloomberg, Mar 26, 2026) captured an industry moment in which brokers and underwriters are revisiting coverage boundaries and premium schedules for affected trades.

The strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz amplifies the insurance implications. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA, 2024), roughly 20% of global seaborne oil exports transit the strait; that concentration means even localized disruptions can translate into wider logistic and pricing effects for crude, refined product flows, and time-charter economics. Historically, insurance markets have reacted to similar disruptions with rapid repricing and temporary withdrawal of capacity, prompting charterers and owners to either pay surcharges or reroute via the Cape of Good Hope—an option that adds days at sea and material fuel and operating costs.

Market structure matters: war-risk covers are typically underwritten on a voyage or time policy basis, and the most loss-sensitive layers sit with Lloyd's syndicates and specialist reinsurance placements. The reinsurance community's appetite for concentrated geopolitical exposures is limited; large-scale claims or a prolonged campaign in the Gulf would rapidly test treaty limits and could materially tighten capacity. That concern is reflected in recent market commentary and the conditional language used by major brokers when discussing exposures with clients.

Data Deep Dive

There are quantifiable market signals consistent with Bjork's characterization. Bloomberg market checks in late March 2026 reported war-risk surcharges for Gulf transits increasing by approximately 30% between February and March 2026, with the largest jumps on product tanker and chemical tanker lanes (Bloomberg, Mar 2026). Those surcharges are additive to base premiums and operate as a de facto tax on transits; for some owners the incremental cost exceeds voyage margin, prompting operational shifts.

Rerouting activity has measurable scale: Lloyd's List Intelligence reported a 22% increase in voyages rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope in Jan–Mar 2026 compared with Jan–Mar 2025 (Lloyd's List, March 2026). The reroute increases voyage duration by an average of 10–14 days for large tankers, translating to higher bunker consumption, increased charter hire days and disrupted scheduled refinery feedstock arrivals. For a VLCC-sized oil cargo, those operational impacts can add multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per voyage in combined incremental cost.

Claims and incident reporting data add texture. While comprehensive loss statistics for 2026 remain incomplete, insurer incident logs show a rise in reported security-related events in Gulf approaches in the first quarter of 2026 relative to the same period a year earlier. Industry claims handlers note an uptick in small- and medium-sized damage claims stemming from near-misses and shrapnel strikes that do not immediately sink vessels but generate repair bills and business interruption claims. The mix of frequent, low-severity incidents and the risk of a single high-severity loss is precisely what war-risk markets find most disconcerting.

The market comparison to earlier episodes is instructive. During the 2019–2020 period of elevated tensions in the Gulf, war-risk premiums for certain trades temporarily multiplied by single-digit factors and capacity withdrew from the riskiest routes; the 2026 market shows similar directional behavior, but with faster information transmission through real-time satellite AIS tracking and more granular insurer analytics, resulting in swifter repricing.

Sector Implications

Shipowners face immediate trade-offs between paying war-risk surcharges, rerouting, or delaying operations. For owners of product tankers and chemical tankers—categories called out in broker notes as most affected—operators must internalize both higher premium loads and the knock-on costs of slower voyage cycles. Charterers are responding by reallocating cargoes, favouring nearby barrels and shorter voyages; that reallocation is visible in changes to S&P and fixture data in March 2026 and alters freight rate curves on short timescales.

Underwriters and reinsurers are recalibrating appetite: treaty terms are being reviewed at the reinsurer level, and facultative placements for large or concentrated exposures are more frequently requested by primary underwriters. The consequence is capacity fragmentation; smaller syndicates may limit line sizes while lead markets reprice or demand escalatory clauses. For corporates engaged in oil and commodity trading, that translated friction can increase hedging costs and complicate logistic optimization models.

Port operators and logistics chains are experiencing asymmetric effects. Ports that serve as alternatives—east and west African hubs associated with the Cape reroute—see volume upticks that strain storage and lightering capacity, temporarily widening operational spreads. Refiners dependent on specific loading windows are increasingly requesting guaranteed arrival periods, which raises pass-through pressure to shippers and ultimately to end-users in the form of higher delivered energy costs.

A parallel consideration is the secondary market for marine insurance: securities and investment vehicles that hold marine-insurance-linked paper may experience repricing as corridor concentration and frequency of losses change the actuarial assumptions underlying those products. The systemic nature of a long Gulf disruption would likely compress liquidity in specialist risk transfer markets, pushing some risk back onto balance sheets.

Risk Assessment

Operational risk remains primary: exposure to kinetic action, mines, missile strikes or drone attacks can produce catastrophic single-event losses that overwhelm annual premium pools. The risk frequency profile in early 2026 skews toward repeated lower-severity events with the potential to escalate. For underwriters, persistent repeated losses—rather than a one-off headline catastrophe—can be more pernicious because they erode premium adequacy and profitability across multiple accounts.

Market liquidity risk is elevating. If lead underwriters withdraw at scale, the remaining market will tighten and premium volatility will accelerate. The reinsurance calendar means that any material re-underwriting will feed into July 2026 renewals in a visible way, potentially producing a broader repricing across marine and energy-related lines. That timing creates a near-term window for additional rate movement ahead of mid-year renewals.

Counterparty and concentration risk also warrant close monitoring. Entities with large exposure to Gulf-transiting cargoes—national oil companies, commodity traders, and certain shipping pools—face correlated risks: higher transit costs, potential cargo delays and insurance coverage complexity. Those correlations increase the likelihood of balance-sheet stress for leveraged owners or trading houses that have narrow margin buffers.

Finally, geopolitical tail risk cannot be ignored. A durable military campaign or an incident that triggers extensive punitive strikes could shift the market from a war-risk premium environment into a sustained insurability crisis. That scenario carries macroeconomic implications for energy markets and would likely prompt direct sovereign interventions on insurance or naval escorts, altering the private insurance calculus.

Fazen Capital Perspective

Fazen Capital's view diverges from market panic in one key respect: while the short-term repricing and operational dislocations are real and measurable, the structural ability of markets to reroute and insurers to reallocate capacity mitigates the probability of a multi-quarter insurance crisis. Historically, the 2019–2020 Gulf episodes produced sharp but transient premium spikes; the modern market is more responsive due to satellite AIS monitoring, faster claims reporting and a larger pool of capital in structured reinsurance markets. That said, reliance on rerouting raises a secondary-cost vector that is more persistent and less visible in headline premium numbers—longer voyages, higher fuel burn and greater emissions intensity.

This suggests a nuanced allocation of concern: credit and liquidity stress are more likely to appear in subsegments (highly leveraged owners, short-tenor time-charters) rather than across the entire shipping capital stack. For risk managers, the pragmatic implication is to stress-test logistics and insurance budgets for a 30–60 day period of elevated surcharges and to model reroute-induced time-costs explicitly. For insurers, the contrarian insight is that disciplined underwriting and selective capacity expansion could be profitable in the medium term as market volatility normalizes and less-capitalized competitors retreat. For further institutional commentary on trade and risk allocation see our insights hub topic.

FAQ

Q1: How quickly can shipowners switch trade routes and what is the scale of cost impact?

Operationally, rerouting from the Strait of Hormuz around the Cape of Good Hope typically adds 10–14 days for large crude tankers, depending on origin and destination ports. The incremental cost for a VLCC-sized voyage can be several hundred thousand dollars when bunker fuel, charter hire and opportunity costs are combined; that is why a relatively modest war-risk surcharge can be more economical than rerouting for some cargos. Historically, during the 2019 Gulf tensions, freight differentials and extra-voyage costs shifted cargo economics within weeks. Real-time AIS monitoring reduces the informational lag today, allowing faster operational decisions, but physical transit time remains the limiting factor.

Q2: What precedent should investors use to calibrate loss severity and insurance market responses?

The 2019–2020 episodes in the Gulf provide the closest modern precedent: war-risk premiums increased materially for exposed corridors and some insurers withdrew capacity temporarily, but markets rebalanced within several quarters as underwriting discipline and alternative capacity returned. That episode teaches two lessons: (1) premium spikes can be sharp but often short-lived, and (2) the economic damage to end-users can be amplified through secondary channels—longer voyages, disrupted refinery inputs and volatile freight curves. Investors should therefore focus on cash-flow and counterparty resilience in exposed firms rather than assuming uniform system-wide insolvency risk.

Q3: Are there structural mitigants in the reinsurance and capital markets?

Yes. The growth of insurance-linked securities and broader capital-market appetite for tail risk has expanded the pool of available capacity in recent years. Structured reinsurance and collateralized facilities can absorb episodic losses, but they come with terms and trigger mechanics that may not respond instantaneously to rapidly evolving geopolitical events. The July 2026 reinsurance renewals will be an important near-term juncture to observe capacity flows and price discovery in response to the March 2026 developments.

Outlook

In the next 30–90 days, expect continued elevated war-risk surcharges for Gulf transits, ongoing rerouting for marginal cargoes, and tighter underwriting language in new policies and renewals. Market volatility should be highest in short-tail product and chemical tanker corridors where operational margins are thin and substitution options limited. The July reinsurance renewals will be a critical inflection point for capacity and price discovery; if treaty pricing and capacity tighten materially at that juncture, broader second-order effects across commodity and logistics markets will accelerate.

Over a 6–12 month horizon, unless there is a decisive military escalation that materially degrades shipping safety, the more likely scenario is a partial normalization of premiums with persistent structural cost increases from longer voyage patterns and higher baseline security protocols. Monitoring indicators we believe are most predictive—incident frequency, underwriter line sizes, and reroute volumes reported by Lloyd's List Intelligence—will be essential for assessing the persistence of the current repricing.

Bottom Line

Cambiaso Risso's March 26, 2026 warning that the Strait of Hormuz risk is "very high" is supported by tangible market responses: higher war-risk surcharges, a measurable rise in rerouted voyages and pressure on underwriting capacity. The immediate market reaction is severe but, absent a major escalation, likely to evolve into a new normal of higher structural costs rather than a prolonged insurability crisis.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.