Why risk transfer alone won’t win corporate clients

Ivan Gonzalez has a familiar problem. There are “30 to 50 commercial insurance companies globally” and plenty of them can quote a line and move on. So how do you stand out?

On this week’s Voice of Insurance, the CEO of Swiss Re Corporate Solutions talks about being a “specialized risk partner for mid and large size corporations”, and what that means in practice.

From limits to “risk insights”

Gonzalez’s view is that the buyer has changed. Risk managers now “interact at CEO level, board level” and the agenda is wider: “geopolitics, supply chain, energy transition.”

So when an insurer turns up with capacity alone, it misses the point. “Less and less, they’re interested on the risk transfer element,” he said. It still matters, but clients also want “risk insights” and a proper discussion about the issues that keep moving under their feet.

In his words, the aim is to “try to stay away of being a commoditized market.”

Why “de-correlated” matters when the cycle turns

There is a portfolio point running through the episode too. Gonzalez likes lines that are not welded to the P&C cycle. Credit and surety, and accident and health, have “their own cycles” and are “completely decorrelated” from P&C. In a world where pricing can shift quickly, that insulation counts.

And he thinks pricing is shifting quickly.

He agreed the market has softened faster than many expected. Business is being traded “much faster than in the past”, capital is available, and technology speeds up the move to a new clearing price. His advice is not to obsess about the scoreboard. “The biggest question at the end of the day is how are we as an industry serving our clients?” he said.

He also reminded everyone that price is only part of the answer. “You can have the best pricing in the world” and still come unstuck if your terms and conditions are wrong. In a more competitive market, discipline starts with risk selection.

Data centres are now “much more concrete”

Asked about the data centre boom, Gonzalez said it has moved beyond talk. “I think right now you see much more concrete plans. You see much more concrete demand.”

He framed it through a triangle: “geopolitics, energy, and technology, and AI specifically.” Put those together and you can see why energy, engineering and construction, and nat cat property are drawing attention.

He also made a practical point about how these mega-risks get placed. You do not need everyone to agree on day one. You need leaders first. “You’re going to need lead players,” he said, with “the knowledge, the risk insights, and the capabilities to put out the terms, the conditions, the pricing of the risk.” After that, the rest of the tower follows. “Follow capacity basically just provides the capital.”

And yes, Swiss Re wants to be in the first camp. “We say we’re built to lead,” he said.

MGAs, M&A, and not learning the hard way

On MGAs, Gonzalez accepts there is “a role” for them, but he has also “seen this movie” before and “we know how it ends.” There will be “the exceptional great MGA”, he said, but “by and large” he thinks “a lot of people are going to struggle.” His scepticism is aimed at “plain vanilla MGAs” that simply replicate what carriers can already do.

His warning was sharp: “if you learn by paying hundreds of millions of dollars of losses, maybe there was better ways to learn.”

On M&A, he was equally direct. He has watched cycles of deals that created no value and some that destroyed good franchises through overpayment and bad integration. Swiss Re will look at opportunities, but he wants discipline for a very human reason: “I don’t want to have my successor in five years cleaning the mess that I made.”

AI: the plumbing comes first

Gonzalez thinks AI could “eventually” become a standalone class, but not yet. Before that, he expects the early wins to be operational, then gradually more support for underwriting.

The constraint, he said, is data. “The biggest test for the industry relies on data and data management.” If “your data is all over the place” you will never get close to the upside.

He compared it to the insurtech wave: a “beautiful website” up front, then “clunkiness of systems” behind it. His point was simple. AI will not fix messy foundations.

A final point worth sitting with

Right at the end, Gonzalez landed on something the industry rarely says out loud: “for every dollar a client buys, from insurance, a lot stays somewhere.” The ambition should be to make that leakage smaller over time.

Because, as he put it, “The industry is here for the clients.” The goal is to “make the life of our clients better.”