In this A.M.BestTV episode from the ICMIF Meeting of Reinsurance Officials (MORO) conference in Montreal last month, a panel of insurers, reinsurers and brokers said 2017’s catastrophes brought temporary uncertainty to the market, but there’s been little slowdown in reinsurers’ pricing wars. Click here to view the entire programme.

A conference-related survey found that a consensus believes the reinsurance market is unsustainable, while 62% of attendees said that they would rather be a buyer of reinsurance than a provider.

“When I first saw that figure, I was surprised since I definitely did not feel that way during the last renewal season, based on the worldwide catastrophes of 2017,” said Apundeep Lamba, Vice President, Corporate Actuarial & Reinsurance Services at ICMIF member The Co-operators (Canada).

“However, as the uncertainty reduced, it became apparent that the capacity was just as available as it had been prior to 2017. Consequently, the events of 2017 did not really reduce the overall capacity,” Lamba concluded.

Andreas Beckmann, Chief Underwriting Officer and Director at ICMIF member company R+V Versicherung AG (Germany), believes that pricing should be higher than what it is presently. However, with the present state of the market, he said he realizes that, “As reinsurers, our job is to find solutions that will enable us to put a portfolio together … so that at the end of the day, we have something that will give us a little bit of a profit.”

Other people that appear in this episode:

• Gregg Lockhart, Director, Reinsurance Operations, Shelter Mutual Insurance Company; and
• Anthony Phillips, Chairman, Latin America and the Caribbean, Willis Re.

For full video coverage from the MORO, including exclusive executive interviews, visit http://www.ambest.tv/moro18.

This article has been adapted from an original post from A.M. Best, one of ICMIF’s Supporting Members. This is reproduced with the permission of the original author. Our thanks to A.M. Best.