AI's real power in reinsurance—and what's holding the industry back

The Re/insurance Outlook Europe 2026 conference takes place in Zurich on 24–25 June, hosted by Intelligent Insurer and sponsored by Solveva. Over 300 senior leaders will be in attendance, hearing insight from more than 60 speakers. Over the two days, C-suite and senior underwriting, strategy risk and capital leaders from across Europe will come together for candid discussions on the forces reshaping reinsurance.

Volker Lauff (pictured), Head of Product and Business Development at Solveva, brings considerable reinsurance expertise to his keynote session at the conference on “Building Maintainable Reinsurance Tools at AI Speed”. A veteran of Swiss Re, where he worked on risk and capital optimisation, Volker has spent his career at the intersection of software engineering and reinsurance – building tools precise and durable enough to serve an industry where a solution must last a decade as a minimum and remain traceable across every deal priced in that time. His conviction is that AI's real power in reinsurance lies not in rebuilding from scratch, but in working within a well-architected, modular framework – one that can adapt to a dynamic environment without ever sacrificing the backwards compatibility the industry depends on.

You've spent two decades in reinsurance and still hold board seats and consulting mandates – yet much of your energy goes into building tools for the industry. What pulls you there?

At Swiss Re I had responsibility for a dynamic financial analysis tool – the combination of software engineering and a business domain was love at first sight. Today, at Solveva, I have the enormous privilege of working with outstanding teams that combine expertise and talent. We are building leading software for core reinsurance processes, supporting some of the brightest minds as they take on the world's most challenging risks.

AI removes every excuse to keep the old systems. What's holding reinsurers back?

Reinsurance, the art of managing risk, is a long-term game. Consequently, relationships are built over long periods of time – Swiss Re, for example, was founded in 1863 and continues to do business with Helvetia today; that's a 163-year relationship. 

While pen and paper have had their days, tools still need to last at least a decade, and whatever tool is used, the ability to retrace calculations from ten years back is a fundamental requirement. This is why so many reinsurers stick with Excel – they save a workbook for each deal, complete with all the relevant parameters and often the full algorithm within it. The downsides are well known, but it’s hard to find a convincing alternative.

AI can speed up development, but rebuilding from scratch and fixing as you go isn't a realistic option given what's at stake – the results must be reproducible a decade back, so the solution cannot be half-hearted. "Move fast and break things" is a great mindset for many problems; reinsurance pricing isn't one of them. The danger isn't AI itself – it's letting it loose on the whole system. Used in the right place, it's already a real accelerator.

Why do you put so much emphasis on maintainability – and what does it actually take to get there?

The real quality of a solution only shows over its lifespan. The reinsurance environment is very dynamic, and it will only become more so. A tool needs to keep adapting while never losing that crucial backwards compatibility – and those changes can't be foreseen today, though the good news is that you can prepare for them before going live.

There are three fundamentals. The first is to build on a stack that's common and central enough that it will still be relevant in ten years. The second is to build tools intuitive enough that the implementation practically documents itself. The third, and most important, is to break the complexity into modules. Each one must be small enough to be understood in isolation and well enough encapsulated that you can change the application without breaking it. That last point is the whole game – because it's only within that kind of architecture that AI can truly be applied.

Where does AI come into that?

Designing the architecture – breaking the whole solution into the right modules – is a human task. That's where the judgement lives and where you stay personally accountable; you don't need much AI for that. At most, the cleverest tools serve as a sounding board for architectural decisions. But once the solution has been decomposed into small, well-encapsulated modules with a clear scope, that's the environment where AI shines. Inside a contained space like that, you can let it work, because you can still understand and check what it produced. Take the calculation endpoints: each one dedicated to a single task. Those you can build with AI support, fast, without putting the whole system at risk.

Ideally the front end is just as modular and there it matters even more, because that's where the complex workflows live, where you get the most user feedback, and where a change in terms and conditions shows up first. How you keep that maintainable is the hardest part of the whole story – and the part you'll have to come to Zurich for.

Five years from now, what will separate the reinsurers who got this right from the ones who didn't?

Those who successfully navigate the transition will see the impact across the entire business. Underwriting will become more flexible — with more options, faster responses, and even new products for both existing and new cedents. Economics will improve, driven by lower cost ratios and, in turn, greater market share. Decision-making will also become sharper: with underwriting data structured for machine learning, more effective portfolio steering and retrocession optimisation, and stronger preparation for adverse scenarios.

In a highly competitive and transparent B2B market, the implications of that gap — between those who adapt and those who do not — are significant and easy to imagine.

To find out more about joining Solveva and 250+ senior leaders at  Re/insurance Outlook Europe event, visit https://events.newton.media/Reinsurance-Outlook-Europe-2026 or email Debbie Atwell (datwell@newtonmedia.co.uk

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