Reinsurance hard market can run through 1.1 ’25: Everest’s Williamson

Everest Insurance Group expects good growth conditions for property cat reinsurance even beyond the January 1, 2025 reinsurance renewals, given the full array of dynamics now present in the market, Everest's chief of reinsurance Jim Williamson has claimed. 

“Our view is that it puts legs on this market and our expectation remains that these terrific conditions will last past the January 1, 2025 renewal,” Williamson told equity market analysts during his company's fourth quarter earnings call. 

The boom in cat bond issuance has created some competition in the upper layers of programmes where Everest might most like to be present, Williamson admitted. 

The cat bond boom “caps price increase” in those layers, “but there are plenty of areas in these programmes where we can do exceptionally well.”

The strength of the reinsurance market follows the continuing dearth of new capital on the supply side beyond retained earnings and the 2023 investment rebound, continuing demand gains, the “underwriting psychology” of having watched multiple yeas of elevated loss activity and the realisation that elevated cat losses are a new normal, Williamson argued. 

At the 2024 1.1 exercise, Everest completed deployment of the $1.5 billion in new capital it raised in the equity market in 2023, the largest of only several capital increases seen from major existing players during the 2023 market reset.

Did you get value from this story?  Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories like this sent straight to your inbox.