Still Feeding the Furnace: Lockton Re on Growth, AI and the Future of Reinsurance Broking

The reinsurance market has shifted faster than almost anyone predicted. Rates that were expected to soften have softened sharply, 1/1/27 is already shaping up as a harder conversation, and AI has moved from experiment to daily workflow in under two years. In the latest Voice of Insurance episode, Tim Gardner, Global CEO, and Bob Bisset, CEO North America at Lockton Re – a firm that has grown from start-up to $300 million in revenue in the time this podcast has been running – offer one of the most grounded, un-hedged reads on where the market is heading that you will hear this year.

A Good Time to Buy, and a Stickier Renewal on the Horizon

Gardner is direct about where the market stands. “2026 is a good time to be a reinsurance buyer,” he says. “Prices are still soft and softening.” After years of hard market conditions that frustrated cedants, reinsurers are now competing aggressively for business, supply continues to outstrip demand, and alternative capital – both ILS and third-party – is squeezing in from multiple directions. Bisset notes that reinsurers have responded by doubling down on target client strategies, getting ever closer to buyers to protect their market share.

Yet Gardner is equally candid about where the cycle heads next. He predicts the 1/1/27 renewal season will be a far more interesting conversation as margins thin and rate adequacy becomes harder to defend. For brokers, the implication is clear: the pipeline that matters tomorrow is the one being built today. Lockton Re currently has 15 RFPs in flight, spanning property, casualty, Latin America, capital markets, and capital advisory, and Gardner credits this not to market tailwinds but to deliberate, sustained relationship building. “If you built your business as a sales business where you’re constantly out on the street looking for opportunities, trying to create value for clients, trying to be creative,” he says, “then [a softening market] doesn’t make growth harder to come by.”

On alternative capital, both men are equally clear-eyed. The ILS market is, both agree, demonstrably more sophisticated than the 2013–16 vintage – writing quota shares into specialty lines, sitting behind syndicates, and asking the right questions about risk. The result, Gardner explains, is that reinsurance demand is being squeezed from two directions at once: ILS from above and third-party capital through sidecars and quota shares on the side. Understanding those dynamics – and advising clients on how best to navigate them – is precisely where analytical depth earns its keep.

AI: From Model Building to Consultancy

The AI discussion is grounded in specifics rather than aspiration. Gardner points to actuarial workflows as the clearest early win: curve fitting, exposure and experience modelling, and loading material into stochastic tools. “What it’s allowed us to do is take the actuaries that had been spending a lot of their time in lower value-added model building, and now they’re interpreting the models and talking to clients about them.” Contract wording generation is another practical gain, removing the need to search through clause libraries and dramatically cutting turnaround time.

Bisset frames the opportunity plainly: “We’ll take advantage any time we can use a product or use AI to free up some of our best educated people to be able to think more creatively.” Gardner’s longer-range view is the one that lands hardest. He describes the evolution of the reinsurance broker in three steps: transaction, then analytics, and now something altogether more strategic. “I think it’s going to allow us to wear an even more dramatic consultancy hat,” he says, “because we’re going to be able to think at a broader portfolio level, capital level, full enterprise value deliverable.” In practice, that means going beyond portfolio analysis – identifying which lines a client is not in but should be. The data to do that, drawn from across Lockton’s insurance and reinsurance business, is already there.

Portfolio Solutions: Direction of Travel, Not Passing Phase

Facilitation and portfolio solutions get substantial airtime, and Gardner’s view is unambiguous. “There is absolutely a direction to travel where policy by policy trading in the insurance business is going to be slowly, and quickly, augmented by portfolio capability.” Lockton Re has deliberately built binder capabilities in both the US and London, and, crucially, brings reinsurance-grade analytical skills to facility creation: “The skill set is really a reinsurance one. It’s portfolio modelling, it’s portfolio trading. It’s the DNA of our business.”

What distinguishes the firm’s approach, Gardner argues, is the starting point. Ron Lockton’s standing instruction to the team is unequivocal: show me directly where this starts with client value, and then we will go forward and try to build something. That discipline has led Lockton Re to pass on large multi-line, multi-geography London-based platforms in favour of structures that solve a specific client problem first. Client-first rigour will matter more, not less, as the larger facilities come under results pressure. It is, Gardner says, “going to be one of the most exciting pieces of our market over the next five years.”

The Full Picture

Gardner and Bisset are not painting a picture of smooth sailing. Carrier consolidation will continue notably without removing capacity from the market, and the 1/1/27 renewal season is shaping up as a genuine inflection point for rate adequacy. The MGA sector faces a more selective environment as delegated authority comes under scrutiny. Yet across all these dynamics, the thread running through this conversation is the same: disciplined growth built on client relationships and analytical depth, not rate momentum.

If you’re navigating a softening market, thinking seriously about AI, or trying to get facilitation right before the cycle turns, this episode is worth a listen.