QBE Re managing director Nick Hankin appeared on the latest Voice of Insurance podcast. With reinsurance pricing softening faster than many expected at the most recent renewals, you might expect growth ambitions to be quietly trimmed. Not at QBE Re.

Speaking to the Voice of Insurance podcast, managing director Nick Hankin argued that disciplined, partnership-led growth can deliver outsized results even in a cooler market, and that the route from a $3bn book today to a $6bn business in five years is both deliberate and defensible.

Now in his 31st year in the industry and three months into the top job at QBE Re, Hankin laid out a strategy built on continuity, deep client relationships and a clear-eyed view of where new opportunity is opening up – from data centres to AI.

A $6bn ambition, built on continuity

QBE Re has tripled in size over the past six years to a $3bn book spanning London, Bermuda, Brussels, Dublin, Dubai and North America, with around 150 staff underwriting property, casualty and specialty across three regional P&Ls.

Hankin’s plan is to double the business again by 2030, lifting QBE Re into the global top 15. But he is at pains to stress what won’t change.

“The priority for me really is around continuity. It’s about stability. It’s really about partnership with our clients, building on that expertise, responsiveness,” he said.

Around 70% of the book already sits with global key clients, sophisticated buyers looking for multi-year partnerships across products and jurisdictions. Hankin’s bet is that those clients will grow meaningfully over the next three to five years, and that QBE Re can expand its share of their reinsurance spend without straining anyone’s security committee.

Holding the line through softening

Reinsurers entered 2025 expecting an orderly market. The pace of softening took some by surprise. Hankin is unfazed.

“We’ve run economics, and so we anticipate that when we set the plans. We’ve anticipated that also when we’ve set the trajectory for the growth of the business,” he said. “The imperative to earn a decent return on the capital that we’ve provided doesn’t go away.”

He believes the market’s structural gains are intact. Cedant retentions remain higher, attachment points have held and terms and conditions are not eroding. Headline natural catastrophe losses now seem stuck at or above the $100bn mark each year. The trick, he argued, is having a portfolio diversified enough by product, geography and client to keep growing into the cycle rather than retreat from it.

Sidecars, third-party capital and saying yes

That growth ambition is being supported by an expanding toolkit. In 2025 QBE Re launched its first casualty sidecar, a quota share that brings third-party investors into a defined portion of its casualty portfolio, and Hankin signalled more to come, alongside continued use of cat bonds and retro.

The rationale is less about cheap capital and more about flexibility. “I want us to be in a position where we can say yes to clients if they need more support on casualty or if they’re growing a particular line, even if it’s potentially meaning we’re a bit overweight on a particular product at a particular time,” he said.

Unlike the ILS surge of a decade ago, Hankin doesn’t see burgeoning alternative capital as destabilizing. Today’s investors, he suggested, are more sophisticated and well placed to be long-term partners as QBE Re manages its mix through the cycle.

Data centres, AI and the next wave of demand

Where will the new growth come from? Hankin pointed to credit, mortgage and life reinsurance, whole-account quota shares in North America, A&H within specialty, and a newly opened Singapore office. But it was the data centre boom that drew the most pointed commentary.

“They’re a long way from the old office risks we used to insure,” he said, noting that the scale of investment now coming across underwriters’ desks demands tighter collaboration between brokers, insurers and reinsurers to assemble credible solutions.

On AI itself, Hankin sees a dual story. Internally it is an enabler, processing unstructured submissions and helping a small global team scale into a $6bn business. Externally, it is something more interesting: an emerging casualty peril.

“It’s certainly as of today a risk amplifier, if only because of the scale, the speed of the technological change, the fact that it could drive correlated losses or systemic risk,” he said. For now, QBE Re views AI as embedded within existing liability products rather than a standalone class much, Hankin noted, as cyber was treated a decade ago.

The takeaway

Hankin’s pitch is a quietly confident one: in a softening market, scale matters less than relevance, surprises are the enemy of long-term partnership, and the reinsurers best positioned to grow are those willing to deploy every tool – third-party capital, technology, new products – to keep saying yes to their best clients.

Listen to the full podcast episode to hear the complete conversation on QBE Re’s growth strategy, market dynamics, and the future of AI in reinsurance.