Laurent Montador, Deputy Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of French reinsurer Arundo Re, told Reinsurance News at RVS 2025 in Monte Carlo, that as the risk landscape continues to evolve, it’s important to stay disciplined.
Montador explained that at this year’s RVS, the hard discussions with clients and brokers were not the focus, suggesting that these will take place later in the year.
“There has not been the strong commitments from one side or the other, because from the beginning, the market is softer, so it means a decrease in premium,” he said. “Now, it’s about the extent of this decrease, and also the demand of new capacity, or re-emergence of older capacity with lower frequency cover and sometimes aggregates.”
Montador noted that Arundo Re is “flexible up to a certain level,” and he highlighted the need for only single digit rate reductions in certain areas, which is something feasible and understandable.
“But for us, there is a need to stay disciplined with structure. Of course, there’s talk of lower layers and the frequency cover, but we don’t want to come back to a period where you have everything that could be covered. You try and model it all, but in fact, it’s very difficult to model it. The losses are coming from places unexpected. So, we really prefer clear covers, named perils,” he said.
Adding: “There are always new things to be discovered, not only in terms of vulnerabilities, but also physically, new faults with earthquakes, for example. So, we are always learning something new about the dangers that we could face. It’s clear that risks are evolving and growing, and the correlations are challenging, especially with secondary perils, with climate change. And it’s not just the ‘normal’ attritional risk – correlation; it’s also the correlations on the longer tail of the probability curves. To have a wildfire in winter is something really new linked with previous drought.”
In terms of what clients want heading into 2026, Montador noted stability in their reinsurer panels.
“They don’t like the opportunistic players, and they prefer across the board players. They know that it’s more a buyer’s market. They do not react strongly, even if they felt a little bit shocked in 2023. Perhaps the reinsurance market could have reacted less in 2023, in order to say, okay, this is what we really need, let’s do it in two years’ time.”
Montador also discussed technology, emphasising that he’s a strong believer in tech and innovation and the arrival of Gen AI.
“It has to be done taking into account privacy and security. We train our people with Gen AI, with Microsoft copilot, and also with other tools in order to, for example, enhance delivery and make it faster. They say it can save up to 30% of the time. This is good, because we need to react quickly. It’s not obligatory to be among the first to adopt a new technology, but at least we have to be quick in adopting the maturing technology. “And, Gen AI is a very good tool for knowledge management and to be able to incorporate all the knowledge.
Montador is also a strong believer in data and notably big data, which is vital for insurers and reinsurers.
“Now, you don’t have only a small portion of data aggregated to the reinsurers, the full, very thin, granularity data could be given to the reinsurance underwriter. And this granularity and cleaner granularity could, in fact, provide more capital in a way, because you have smaller boxes of risk area, and you can better manage your exposure. And that’s what we do.
“We also have an exposure management tool where we do rollover of our cat portfolio every day. And so, we can also price, have the marginal pricing of the portfolio, which is very important to have during the renewal process.
“We also have a life activity, and the servicing in life activity is also using software and a kind of SaaS as a service within our clients. And being able to give quotation very quickly about non-standard risk, with also medical doctor advisors, to quote a specific life product, for example,” he said.
To end, Montador discussed evolving risk patterns including catastrophes, geopolitical risks, and cyber.
“We have to cope with second events, so an event just after another previous event. This is clearly true for earthquake, but it is also true for big windstorms. And so, it’s all about correlations, in fact. We learn more and more with climate change in the very tail risk. And so, the correlations are not the same than on the attritional part of the claims. We have progress to make on that.
“Secondary perils, as they are called, are very important, because now it’s the largest part of the cat losses and not only for property. Even now you can have a wildfire due to motor tpl, and so we have to be careful on other lines of business as well, including L&H with heatwaves and pollution. We need to be able to take some buffer in our quotations, to take what is, in fact, unknown, and to make loadings,” said Montador.
“On geopolitical and trade tensions, I see protectionism measures as a stress for reinsurance. These have impact on economies and financial markets, impacting our balance sheets and needs for capital. About sanctions taken by different countries, these are understandable on the one hand and we have to cope with this as existing reinsurers being aware that counter-measures can be taken by other countries.
“It’s also good to remember that reinsurance is by definition an international business with competitors from everywhere. And in Europe, we have to be careful with too stringent over-regulation measures. It’s very difficult for newcomers to cope with the new regulations or capital requirements. Maybe it’s an explanation why there is no newcomers,” he added.
“With emerging risk like cyber, which we think is still emerging, we try to learn more before having an active underwriting. In Europe, the level of data has nothing in common with the level of data in the US, and the market is largely in the US. You have big corporates that have cyber insurance because the financial markets want them to have cyber insurance. They also put pressure on their suppliers in order for them to have a cyber product as well. So, the resilience is growing, but there is lots of progress to do in the SMEs. For us, we privilege existing clients with an across the board philosophy, across different lines of business, including explicit cyber, we say yes so long as cyber insurance is sold with prevention measures and crisis management,” concluded Montador.
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