{"id":6572,"date":"2024-02-22T10:00:17","date_gmt":"2024-02-22T10:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"httpss:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/?p=6572"},"modified":"2025-03-25T10:48:53","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T10:48:53","slug":"new-podcast-with-kera-mcdonald-cuo-swiss-re-corporate-solutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/new-podcast-with-kera-mcdonald-cuo-swiss-re-corporate-solutions\/","title":{"rendered":"A reinsurance \u2018big bang\u2019 has made everyone think twice on profitability, says Swiss Re\u2019s Kera McDonald"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe title=\"Ep199 Kera McDonald Swiss Re Corporate Solutions: Trendspotting and Avoiding Passivity\" allowtransparency=\"true\" height=\"150\" width=\"100%\" style=\"border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);height:150px;\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?i=cs5u2-1588011-pb&amp;from=pb6admin&amp;share=0&amp;download=1&amp;rtl=0&amp;fonts=Tahoma&amp;skin=3267a3&amp;font-color=&amp;logo_link=episode_page&amp;btn-skin=1b1b1b\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Insurers have a sharpened focus on profitability after taking on more risk from the reinsurers, says Swiss Re Corporate Solutions&#8217; Chief Underwriting Officer, Kera McDonald.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Speaking in the latest Voice of Insurance podcast hosted by Mark Geoghegan, McDonald said primary insurers have faced a reinsurance reset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>McDonald, part of Swiss Re\u2019s corporate primary insurance arm, said the transition started last year and fed through into this year\u2019s January reinsurance renewals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>McDonald said: \u201cThere were several years of catch up that caused that big bang, if you want to call it that, at the beginning of last year for the reinsurers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThat means that for us as an insurer, and for all of my competitors, we now retain a larger part of those frequency losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe need to have a much more focused approach to the modelling of the secondary perils that I think it took the industry a while to catch up on &#8211; the wildfires and the floods and the hails and things like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAnd so I do believe that it made people really think twice about the profitability, especially on the cat side of what they have and the volatility they need to cover themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Explaining underwriting actions taken, McDonald said Swiss Re in the US exited the large general liability corporate market space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Discussing priorities, she said it was important to understand the underlying drivers behind inflation. This would help mitigate claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, there would always be something \u2018unknown,\u2019 creating the volatility which reinsurance would partly cover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Asked by Geoghegan about rates, she said: \u201cNorth America property right now, we believe, is well priced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI think that when you look into EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) as well, Europe is attractive for core property also. Casualty remains profitable for EMEA also.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAPAC (Asia Pacific) and LATAM (Latin America), they\u2019re growth areas for us. Across most of the lines actually, it is looking relatively stable, which is a good place to be.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Questioned by Geoghegan on cashflow underwriting, the idea that insurers could use interest rate-buoyed asset income to soften prices, pull in volume but with combined rations above 100 per cent, McDonald said \u2018you have to produce profit as an underwriter not just as a loss leader for asset income\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Looking to the future, Geoghegan brought up the topic of digitalisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>McDonald said: \u201cSo we&#8217;re really working around, right now, reducing manual work, reducing the cost that goes along with that, and enabling our people to focus on the value-added parts as opposed to the repetition parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;\u201cSo, things like ingestion of data. I mean, that was a relatively easy one to spot as far as a place that could add value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe&#8217;re working on that. We have several use cases that are going with the data group from the Swiss free Institute, as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt&#8217;s really around augmentation of our underwriting process in decision, rather than any kind of substitution at this point. So that&#8217;s really where we&#8217;re heading with it, at least for now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Insurers have a sharpened focus on profitability after taking on more risk from the reinsurers, says Swiss Re Corporate Solutions&#8217; Chief Underwriting Officer, Kera McDonald. Speaking in the latest Voice of Insurance podcast hosted by Mark Geoghegan, McDonald said primary insurers have faced a reinsurance reset. McDonald, part of Swiss Re\u2019s corporate primary insurance arm, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6574,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[10,39,14],"line-of-business":[28,20],"class_list":["post-6572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","tag-exposure","tag-reinsurance","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-general-liability","line-of-business-property"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6572"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=6572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}