NU Online News Service, Sept. 12, 2:34 p.m. EDT

Ample capacity within the reinsurance market indicates no broad-based hardening in the insurance marketplace, but the three major insurance brokers differ over what direction the industry will be taking in the future.

Alex Moczarski, president and chief executive officer of Guy Carpenter, the reinsurance brokerage subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies, called the reinsurance and insurance industries “adrift and directionless” due to uncertainty involving the world's economy, possibility of inflation, and diminished reserve releases.

“Every CEO in the industry is asking the same question: How do we achieve growth in this directionless market,” Moczarski says during a press conference at the Reinsurance Rendez-Vous in Monte Carlo. “The current climate is uncertain at best, but we believe that growth opportunities exist—or can be created—by those with access to the right insight, tools and transactional capabilities.”

Guy Carpenter also released its 2011 World Catastrophe Reinsurance Market Report noting that there was no widespread hardening in the broad reinsurance market for non-catastrophe lines that remained flat to down. Property catastrophe, on the other hand, was flat to up 10 percent.

Speaking at a PricewaterhouseCoopers event in Monte Carlo, Martin Sullivan, deputy chairman of Willis Group and CEO of Willis Global Solutions, says he believes a broad-based market hardening in no longer likely. Instead, he believes absent a significant natural catastrophe, a hard market is unlikely.

“I am not so convinced that the historic market cycle movements will be repeated again—in fact, I suspect that the 'market cycle' has actually broken down into a number of sub-cycles,” Sullivan says.

Barring a “financial Armageddon,” Sullivan says the industry, because of its ability to recapitalize as it has not done in the past, will have to look elsewhere besides underwriting for growth.

He says “more sustainable competitive advantages need to be developed through operational excellence and reduction in costs, particularly the cost for reinsures to access the risks they would like to write.”

In its 50 page report Reinsurance Market Outlook—Value Creating Capital report released Sunday, the start of the Reinsurance Rendez-Vous, Aon Benfield says “reinsurers remain well-capitalized and have the ability to continue to provide value creating capital to insurers at terms that are accretive to the earnings and capital of insurers.”

The reinsurance broker, a member of Chicago-based insurance broker Aon Corp., says that “assuming only modest additional insured catastrophe events” for the remainder of this year, there is sufficient capital to “meet the demands of insurers globally.”

Aon Benfield says both insurance and reinsurance carriers are expected to end 2011 “with more capital than they held at year end 2010. Insurers are expected to “show a meaningful level of growth” over reinsurers, the broker added.

“Throughout the significant insured catastrophe events of 2011, reinsurance has once again proved its inherent ability to add value as an earnings and capital protection tool,” says Bryon Ehrhart, chairman of Aon Benfield Analytics in a statement.

Special Reports /

Brokers: Reinsurers 'Adrift and Directionless;' Hard Market Unlikely

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