In a recent interview with Reinsurance News during RVS 2025, Howden Re’s Wade Gulbransen, CEO North America, offered an optimistic perspective on the current reinsurance market in the region, describing it as a “market of opportunity” despite recent shifts.
Gulbransen highlighted the significant changes over the past three or four years, noting that while pricing has been a frequent topic, the more critical evolution has been in terms and conditions.
He stated: “On the property side, it’s a market of opportunity, at least that is the way I would describe it. There’s been a lot of changes that have occurred in the last three to four years. Certainly, everyone talks about the hard market and the pricing change that occurred, but really the more material change was on terms and conditions.
“These changes have a meaningful impact on loss all the way through the entire food chain, from the insured who’s taking more risk, to the insurance companies to reinsurers. We believe the change in terms and conditions has created a much healthier environment for everyone that’s involved.”
While acknowledging that rates have softened from their peak, Gulbransen believes this is the best market he has experienced in his 30 years in the business.
The casualty market, however, presents a different picture. The executive noted that adverse development continues in lines such as commercial auto liability and other liability occurrence, requiring a more segmented approach and a focus on careful risk selection and pricing to achieve profitability.
“Despite challenging times, we do believe there’s opportunities to make money in the casualty space, but it’s down to risk selection and how you price the business,” Gulbransen commented.
When discussing the sustained discipline of reinsurance and the future of attachment points, Gulbransen emphasised that retentions need to be seen from two perspectives.
“First, occurrence retentions have moved up considerably over the last three years, and that was driven by market conditions including reinsures appetite, increase in TIVs/exposures, insurance to value, and if you looked at a consistent return time attachments, clients had to increase because of inflation,” the executive explained.
Adding: “My sense is that many carriers are comfortable with the current retention levels on a first event basis, but it’s really the accumulation of losses within their retention that concerns them.
“Accumulation of losses can stem from increase in secondary perils, to even multiple hurricanes. With increased occurrence retentions, naturally, any increase of loss within large retention can create sizeable net retain cat volatility that our clients are trying to manage and mitigate. So, I do think that retentions may come down, but it may not be first event retention, it may just be that second subsequent event retentions decrease. That’s what I predict in the next 12 months.”
Looking ahead to the capacity supply-demand balance for the upcoming 2026 renewals and beyond, Gulbransen anticipates that supply will outpace demand.
However, he also suggested that changes to models and a desire for additional limits could prompt clients to seek more coverage.
“I expect that many of reinsurers will look to deploy increased capacity to their existing client base first, and then look to new attractive partnerships to deploy this additional capacity. I think this sort of strategy will lead to continued discipline in this hard market softening phase of the market,” he added.
Concluding: “Barring anything outside of expected happening this year yet, we will see capacity out strip demand into 2026. I think this is largely due to insurers and reinsurers feeling confident that we are coming off an incredibly attractive market, and there’s great returns available in the market for everyone as we enter 2026.”
The post NA property a “market of opportunity” despite softening: Howden Re’s Gulbransen appeared first on ReinsuranceNe.ws.
