There’s a massive amount of capital looking to enter our industry: Superczynski, Aon

The insurance and reinsurance industry has an opportunity to harness the appetite of global investors to support growth and help find the capacity to make more risks insurable, because “there is a massive amount of capital that’s looking to enter our industry,” according to Kelly Superczynski, Head of Global Capital Advisory at Aon’s Reinsurance Solutions.

Speaking in Monte Carlo at the 2026 Rendez-vous event during a Moody’s hosted panel discussion, Superczynski explained that the industry has a lot of tools available to it, but with emerging and novel risks accelerating at pace in the economy, the job that needs to be undertaken is to work to better understand them and find ways to transfer them to the abundant capital with an appetite for property and casualty lines of business.

Superczynski explained, “To the extent we can start understanding these risks, we can start insuring them. But until we understand them, it’s going to be really hard to find any sort of risk transfer solution and that’s what we spend a lot of time thinking about. How do we get the data in order to try to build some way to understand what the risk is, understand how it’s going to perform, behave. Then how do we get an insurance company or reinsurance company comfortable with that risk so they can contemplate putting capital behind it?

“We’ve seen throughout time, investors, as soon as they get comfortable with the risk and model it, they’re willing to put capacity there. I mean, we’ve seen it in the ILS space that goes back 20 plus years, based on cat models, right. We’re starting to see cyber cat bonds because the cyber models have evolved substantially, and people are getting comfortable with them.

“When you can start modelling and understanding it, you’re going to find capital. The challenge is, between now and then, with these emerging risks it’s hard. Everybody knows they’re there. Aon puts out, every two years, an emerging risk study, and those risks really have not changed much in the past two years. But they’re still uninsurable. So that’s the challenge.

“We need to find a way, and we need to find opportunities for capital to take risks in certain areas that maybe are less modelable, less data driven today, and really take time to try to understand it in different ways. There’s plenty of capacity in the market, it’s just a matter of how we get people coming forwards.”

Moving on to discuss the potential to grow the insurance and reinsurance industry’s capital base meaningfully, Superczynski said she sees no lack in capital appetite, just that the risks need to be made more accessible to investors.

“We estimate the insurance industry is about $4 trillion of capital. If you look at it in the context of a $250 trillion alternative investment market, our insurance industry is dwarfed by the amount of capital that’s sitting out there in investable capital. What we do know, is that these investors are getting more and more interested in our industry. We’re seeing a lot of activity. They’ve been involved in the insurance industry forever, really, more on the life side. They like the large block transactions. They want to accumulate AUM and invest against that. Most of those deals have been done, and so they look to figure out where else they can deploy their assets and so they move pretty quickly to the insurance industry, the P&C insurance industry, and that’s where seeing the activity today. These investors today are different than some of what we’ve seen in the past in the P&C industry. They’re sophisticated. They understand market cycles. They understand we have very short hard markets and very prolonged soft markets. They get that.

“They’re here to deploy capacity permanently because they look at this as an uncorrelated asset. So as we think about the protection gap, as we think about these uninsurable risks, the ability to bring in capital, to bring in more capital, new capital, diversified capital, will hopefully help start solving some of these challenges,” Superczynski said.

The insurance and reinsurance industry is the right partner to help capital move closer to these risks, Superczynski believes.

Highlighting that, “Because we understand, accumulations, unmodeled, unknown risks, you can only put so much on your balance sheet and feel comfortable with it. But if it’s truly spread out and spread out in a different way, over time, hopefully, it’s just so spread out that it’s not going to impact anybody materially. Over time, events start to happen, you start to better understand the risk, and then more and more capital will come behind it.”

She went on to state that growth needs to be the objective, to create the opportunity to feed investor appetite, with a growing number of major asset allocators now looking closely at the sector.

“What we know is there is a massive amount of capital that’s looking to enter our industry. As we all know, you can’t utilise the same thing, just cutting up the pie and sharing it. We need to grow the pie of insurance risk because the capital’s there. We just need to figure out how to access it.

“We think some of these challenges are solvable, and so that’s our goal. Not to run away from them, but continuing to try to figure out where there’s opportunities and to be able to find a way to transfer them to the markets.”

But, when it comes to the emerging risks that were discussed during the Moody’s panel session in Monte Carlo yesterday, Superczynski cautioned that the private re/insurance market is the right place to deal with them, supported by the massive amounts of capital she sees wanting to enter the space.

“These are risks that we insure every day. We’re just bringing capital in, in a different way, because we don’t want it all to sit at the government level, because that’s going to hurt our industry,” Superczynski  said.

Adding that, “Otherwise, we’re going to be shrinking. Where all this capital is coming in, and we all know that the economics of that are not where we want to be. So as the capital is coming in, we need to find ways to transform these risks and work with any form of capital available out there to bring these risks to the open market, and not just hope the government’s going to solve a big problem that we just can’t really get our arms around.”

There is an opportunity to harness this moment and capitalise on investor interest in diversifying sources of return, to bring meaningful capital to the sector and expand the boundaries of insurability, through the expertise of re/insurers that can help them understand and access the risk landscape.