excess & surplus

Speaking during the Chubb first-quarter earnings call today, CEO Evan Greenberg called out supply-demand factors related to capital in the insurance and reinsurance industry, as well as high levels of intermediation cost, as softening the property insurance market at a pace he called “dumb”.

The catastrophe wind market is one of the most aggressively softening segments within the excess and surplus (E&S) lines property market, with rate decreases in the 20% to 30% range becoming “increasingly common”, according to wholesale insurance services provider CRC Group.

Insurance and reinsurance broker Willis Towers Watson (WTW) has launched what looks like a useful property loss modelling tool that allows analysis to be performed for both catastrophe and non-catastrophe property risks.

Reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter has said that it expects reinsurance capacity backing catastrophe loss-affected excess & surplus (E&S) line portfolios will see rate rises of as much as 30% at the mid-year renewals, which bodes well for the ILS funds and alternative capital providers that also underwrite E&S portfolios of risk.

The U.S. excess and surplus (E&S) lines insurance market may come under increasing pressure as reinsurance firms and others with the ability to underwrite E&S risks target the sector to offset lower pricing in other areas of reinsurance, according to Fitch Ratings.

Reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter has launched a new Excess & Surplus Lines Specialty Practice to focus on the needs of these specialist insurers and to help educate them about their use of capital and options for risk transfer, including the capital markets.