If you ask John Berger, chief executive of reinsurance for Alterra Capital Holdings, to describe his vision of Alterra five years from now, part of the answer he'll provide may surprise you.

Despite his three decades of experience in the reinsurance business, Mr. Berger, after expressing the hope that the market will cooperate to provide opportunities for the company to grow bigger through profitable underwriting, will go on to reveal he would like most of the business to come from insurance rather than reinsurance operations.

“The idea would be to have reinsurance be the minority part of it–representing maybe one-third or 40 percent of the company's total gross premiums written–with specialty insurance representing the majority,” he said during a recent interview with NU. “That would be the ideal to me.”

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