Reinsurance market focused on price sustainability at the RVS in Monte Carlo: Poll

A poll undertaken just in advance of the 2024 Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous event by our sister publication Reinsurance News has found that market participants will be especially focused on sustaining prices in their discussions with clients at the event.

Reinsurance News polled its 130,000+ strong LinkedIn following and asked what the focus of their conversations at the RVS event will be this year.

The largest share, 38% of respondents to the poll, said that sustaining price levels will be the main focus for their early discussions that tend to set the tone for the end of year reinsurance renewal season.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the next most popular option was achieving stability in attachment points and terms and conditions, which means those all-important contract features are going to be widely discussed in the Monte Carlo discussions this year.

Depending on who we talk to, our contacts all agree these are the two most important topics of conversation, but there are some that feel the attachments and terms are perhaps even more important than price.

In fact, at some of the reinsurance broker briefings held in advance of this year’s RVS, these contract features were highlighted as what might prove more sticky for the January 2025 renewal season and beyond.

The survey findings are aligned with those of rating agency Moody’s recent annual survey of global property & casualty reinsurance buyers, as most said they anticipate prices remaining stable or to even increase slightly in 2025.

Another popular answer in the Reinsurance News poll was around the continued growth opportunities that are being seen in reinsurance.

24% answered that responding to rising demand will be their main focus at the RVS event, while another 14% said broadening their portfolios in response to opportunities would be their goal.

Brokers have been vocal in pushing for contract term and price improvements for clients, while some such as Aon are hoping reinsurers will be more accommodating when it comes to taking back some of the frequency and sideways risk their clients have been absorbing over the last couple of years of the hard market.

Aon has also highlighted an expectation of the most competitive areas of the market potentially being higher-layers of property catastrophe risk, where the catastrophe bond market and many insurance-linked securities (ILS) managers are most prolific in deploying their capacity.

While market sources expect there will be some give and take on the two top answers to the Reinsurance News poll, price and coverage terms, some suggest it could be a case of a trade-off between the two this year at the renewals.

Whenever this happens we can expect some challenging and perhaps protracted negotiations as the year progresses, as well as a potentially late renewal completion as cedents look to secure the best solutions for their reinsurance for calendar year 2025.