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