Clarke happy with PartnerRe’s ‘pure play’ position
PartnerRe’s strategic decision to operate as a “pure play” reinsurer, together with its private ownership model, means it is well positioned to grow in what it calls a transitioning market, Emmanuel Clarke president & chief executive officer, PartnerRe, told Monte Carlo Today.
With markets and segments responding to loss activity in recent years, he said he remains optimistic about the future of reinsurance as a whole—and about PartnerRe’s positioning within the market.
One additional consequence of the heavy cat losses along with attritional loss activity the industry has experienced in the past two years has been that many cedants have rediscovered the value of reinsurance, he said.
They are increasingly concerned about emerging risks such as cyber and climate change—and want to work with their reinsurers to manage these better.
“We see more risk, risk development, the effects of climate change, the development of cyber and the transformation of the industry that will lead to more risk and risk transfer,” Clarke said.
“We see a continued distaste for volatility from our cedants. Insurance companies are very eager to maintain low volatility.”
PartnerRe has all the tools to help deliver these solutions, Clarke said. He said it has scale and significant financial strength—something validated when it was upgraded by AM Best in August to ‘A+’ from ‘A’.
He said private ownership was a better model for a reinsurer, because of the long-term nature of the reinsurance relationships and the focus on long term economic value growth, undistracted by short term optics.
He discussed the fact that PartnerRe is a pure reinsurance company, unlike many of its rivals which also write insurance business, as being central to its offering.
According to Clarke, writing insurance as a business requires scale and writing reinsurance requires relevance—and few companies are able to marry these two successfully.
“It is a deliberate choice on our part to be ‘pure’,” said Clarke. “We do not compete with our clients and this allows us to concentrate on execution.
“That is a very different business model from insurance. All the folks who have tried to lead the two business models, have always been challenged on execution. That’s a clear differentiation, and that has allowed us to focus on two things in particular: relevance and agility.
“Every company wants to be those two things, but it’s the degree to which you can be relevant and agile.
“We believe that we have the size that is big enough to matter in terms of relevance, but small enough to keep that nimbleness and agility to make the right choices,” he concluded.
