Special Ep: The State of (Re)insurance 2023

This Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous was very different from last year’s.

Last year it was all about reinsurers and brokers getting the clearest message possible across to buyers that the market was going to re-set in a major way at the first of January 2023.

That made it pretty straightforward to report upon – for me or anyone listening to last year’s inaugural reinsurance documentary episode the message was obvious.

And then, if the intentions of mortals weren’t clear enough, the insurance Gods chipped in with major Florida landfalling Hurricane Ian only days later.

The message may or may not have got through but a huge lack of certainty for buyers was the result.

Everyone could see that prices and attachment points had to rise and terms and conditions had to improve, but it was hard to find out specifically what that meant in firm terms from the market until very late in the day.

This was traumatic and painful for many and put relationships under an enormous amount of strain.

I’m recapping all of this because the trauma of the recent past meant that a reasonable part of this year’s Rendez-Vous necessarily dealt with looking back and trying to heal some of that scar tissue, repair fractured alliances and rationalise some of the changes that were made after everybody had last met in 2022.

Reinsurance is a people and trust business and human emotions ran high at 1.1.23 so there was much more of the past tense than you would usually expect from a forward-looking gather such as this.

Things are much calmer now and the word you’ll hear most in this podcast is orderly.

But only once that pain of 1.1 23 was got out of the way was this a Rendez-Vous where we could look forwards and try to answer some of the big questions looming in 2024:

Were the major changes of the-once-and-done variety or was more to come?

Or conversely would the favourable reinsurance market conditions replenish appetites and attract new capital that would unleash renewed competitive forces in a way that has happened so many times in the past?

Would this allow cedants to begin the slow process of chipping away at what reinsurers had gained at the last renewal?

Would anyone be willing to look at selling a product to ease the increased burden on cedants’ earnings?

And after a year marked by back-year deterioration, current inflation and painful US court awards, whether Casualty Reinsurance was likely to be subjected to the kind of re-set that had happened to property markets a year earlier?

What follows will cover all of this and a lot more besides.

My promise to you is that if you weren’t lucky enough to be down on the Med in mid-September, listening to this podcast will be the absolute next best thing to having been there in person, in the room with me as I canvas the views of a very large number key industry figures.

Give me the next hour and I’ll give you the State of (Re)insurance.

LINKS
We thank our sponsor Stephens Rickard:
www.stephensrickard.com