Insurances bosses have listed climate change and customer engagement among key challenges for next year in a KPMG survey.

More than 10% of responses in the study of 220 C-suite executives come from the insurance industry.

Climate change does not figure in the overall top 10, but within the industry concerns about the business impact of global warming weigh heavily.

“Climate change is number 13 on the CEO list, but for insurers it is certainly much higher because they are directly impacted,” KPMG Insurance Partner Scott Guse told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

“I think the view coming from the CEO survey is that they see a lot of inactivity from the Government and that the onus has been placed more on the individual organisations to make their own choices and decisions about climate change at this point.”

Customer engagement is another critical challenge for the industry.

The issue places fifth in the survey ranking, but Mr Guse says insurance leaders view it as a task that “permeates across a lot of the things they are doing” such as digital transformation and innovation.

“The customer is at the heart of all these things. How do we make digital transformation work for the customer? It comes back to customer centricity. Every action that you do around digital innovation needs to have the customer at the heart.

“What works well for the customer, what works best for the customer… those are the decisions you make.”

Digital transformation is the top challenge overall, followed by innovation and disruption, regulation, political paralysis and customer centricity.

Rounding up the top 10 are cost competitiveness, public trust, cyber security and data privacy, Big Data, and infrastructure and liveable cities.