PwC, a professional services firm, has released new research titled Reinsurance 2035: Rethinking the Risk Business, presenting its perspective on how the reinsurance sector may develop over the next decade and beyond, with a particular focus on the Fund and Insure domain.
According to PwC, this domain has the potential to add as much as $17.04 trillion in gross value by 2035, depending on how climate disruption and technological change unfold.
PwC states that this would place reinsurers at the centre of a new financial system, where their role extends beyond capital provision to orchestrating resilience, enabling long-term investment, and facilitating systemic stability.
The company’s analysis highlights that the insurance industry is facing unusually high levels of pressure to adapt.
The firm’s BMR Pressure Index shows that 17 of 22 global sectors are experiencing the strongest reinvention demands in 25 years, with insurance ranking second, driven by climate change, cybersecurity, and geopolitical risk. PwC estimates that these pressures could drive a $604 billion redistribution of financial services market share in 2025 alone.
Recent financial results have been positive, with PwC noting an 8.6% increase in total global premiums in 2024 to €7.0 trillion, the fastest annual growth since before the global financial crisis. Reinsurers also reported robust profitability, with combined ratios at their best level in a decade and returns on equity of 17%, comfortably above the cost of capital.
Yet PwC stresses that these figures mask persistent challenges. The pandemic exposed weaknesses in health and liability systems, while monetary tightening reshaped solvency models. Increasingly frequent climate-linked disasters, from Canadian wildfires to Brazilian floods, continue to reveal the limitations of existing approaches.
PwC identifies what it calls widening gaps in protection, resilience, talent and funding. The firm estimates that the global protection gap reached US$1.83 trillion in 2023, leaving many businesses and individuals without adequate cover.
At the same time, there is a growing mismatch between the scale of risks—particularly climate and cyber—and the capacity of infrastructure and regulatory frameworks to respond. Talent shortages are also intensifying, as the sector requires new expertise in artificial intelligence, data science, and cyber risk.
Finally, PwC emphasises that the funding required for climate adaptation and transition will likely exceed the capacity of traditional balance sheet models, requiring innovative structures to connect capital to risk.
The report also sets the Fund and Insure domain in the context of other parts of the economy. PwC forecasts that by 2035 the Move domain, covering transport and energy infrastructure, could add $5.86 trillion in value, while the Care domain, integrating healthcare and life sciences, may contribute more than $9.31 trillion.
The Fuel and Power domain, reflecting the global transition to electrification, is expected to reach $6.19 trillion. PwC positions Fund and Insure as the financial infrastructure underpinning each of these areas, enabling investment flows, risk management, and transaction continuity.
Looking ahead, PwC suggests that reinsurance leaders will need to both strengthen traditional capabilities such as risk selection, pricing, and capital management, while also redefining their role in a system shaped by climate, technology, and new patterns of capital flow.
The firm states that reinsurers are already moving away from being pure backstops for losses, and toward acting as facilitators of resilience, prediction, and prevention. Investment in data, analytics, and integrated services, PwC notes, is increasingly embedding insurance into broader ecosystems like mobility, energy, and healthcare.
PwC concludes that this shift amounts to a fundamental rethinking of the risk business itself. To remain relevant, reinsurers will need to act early in developing domain-based strategies, collaborate with technology partners to sharpen innovation, and reshape their workforces to include cross-sector expertise.
For PwC, the next decade represents not only a period of financial growth for the sector, but also a test of its ability to address systemic risks and support economic transformation at scale.
Arthur Wightman, Territory and Insurance Leader, PwC Bermuda, a contributor to the report, commented: “The next decade will redefine how we fund and insure the world’s most critical industries.
“The future of re/insurance lies in its ability to orchestrate, not just underwrite, resilience—empowering businesses to thrive amid complexity, as mega trends like climate change and technological disruption reshape the scale and nature of industry reconfiguration.”
Matt Britten, Partner, PwC Bermuda, also an author of the report, added: “Our report identifies four urgent structural gaps that threaten re/insurers ability to serve increasingly complex and interconnected risks: the protection gap, the resilience gap in infrastructure and systems, the talent gap in emerging capabilities, and the funding gap for climate and transition-linked risks. Addressing these four gaps is as if not more critical as managing today’s underwriting and pricing challenges.”
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