{"id":9286,"date":"2024-12-20T06:17:46","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T06:17:46","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-04-22T04:33:32","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T04:33:32","slug":"voi-podcast-with-dieter-winkel-president-of-liberty-mutual-re","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/voi-podcast-with-dieter-winkel-president-of-liberty-mutual-re\/","title":{"rendered":"Pre 1\/1 renewals sneak-peak with Liberty Mutual Re\u2019s Winkel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe title=\"Ep235 Dieter Winkel, President, Liberty Mutual Re: A consistent view of the market\" 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\/?from=embed&amp;i=a3sye-17735c6-pb&amp;share=1&amp;download=1&amp;fonts=Tahoma&amp;skin=3267a3&amp;font-color=&amp;rtl=0&amp;logo_link=&amp;btn-skin=1b1b1b&amp;size=150\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Dieter Winkel can boast a 40-year career in the reinsurance business and now leads a global reinsurer with around $3bn in gross written premium and approximately 250 employees.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>President of Liberty Mutual Re Dieter Winkel was the latest guest to feature on Mark Geoghegan\u2019s Voice of Insurance podcast. Happening late in the year, the conversation was just ahead of the imminent 1\/1 reinsurance renewal season \u2013 very timely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reinsurer has offices across the globe, underwriting almost every line of property, casualty and specialty business. Winkel stresses continuity, long-term thinking, strength and stability \u2013 a leitmotif of the episode and a nod to the reinsurer\u2019s mutual insurance parent, Liberty Mutual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Two years of hard pricing after nine years of previous soft market has been a necessary correction towards sustainable pricing, he emphasises. Winkel doesn\u2019t think we\u2019re in a hard market, having come down slightly from last year\u2019s peak, amid fresh capacity deployed and increased competition, but he calls conditions \u201cdecent\u201d for the imminent renewal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe need to be careful that we&#8217;re not damaging this too much, because we know our world is riskier. I&#8217;m not talking about property catastrophe business, with climate change, but also the geopolitical environment,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He lists political violence as one such \u201cchallenged class\u201d, as well as trade credit, and cyber the still-emerging cyber market business. To build out cyber in particular, he emphasises the talent pool, relationships and distribution, and the products themselves will need to be carefully built out. Scenario planning is core to exploring emerging risks, he notes, using the example of CrowdStrike as an event that &#8211; despite its limited cost \u2013 led to uncertainty about aggregations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt&#8217;s maturing, but we are by far not at the end of the journey. I compare it with the cat market, when we started modelling that some 30 years ago,\u201d Winkel says. \u201cHow often did we get it wrong? How many one-in-100 year [events] did we have in a decade?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Looking to 1\/1, Winkel says \u201ca few firm orders\u201d in Europe are out already.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe market is, in principle, very disciplined. I think we&#8217;ve learned our lesson from the past. I can&#8217;t ignore the fact that people have seen good results over the last one or two years, and lots of people who have more appetite,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThere is more competition coming to the market. On the other hand, there is also more demand, depending on the class and the area. I do believe there is a fair, reasonable balance, we&#8217;ll see a competitive market environment,\u201d he continues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On <a href=\"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/catastrophe-risk-in-focus-a-single-view-of-risk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">property catastrophe reinsurance<\/a>, Winkel highlights the pressure facing underwriters as risk-takers, relative to brokers, when a US hurricane is bearing down on Florida, noting the temptation to check in on the track of a storm as it barrels towards concentrations of exposure, such as Tampa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cBoth [hurricanes] Helene and Milton were decent losses proper cats, by far, not as big as they could have been,\u201d he says. \u201cHad Milton gone into Tampa, for example, it would have been a significant change to the market. It would have held back renewals and capacity among the repercussions. Anyway, that didn&#8217;t happen. So the reality is that the impact on pricing, on structures, is modest, to be honest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The US cat market has corrected, in terms of retention levels and pricing, reaching \u201cthe right level\u201d, while other international markets still have \u201cmore to be done\u201d, he suggests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He is concerned by flood risk \u201ca big exposure and we have underestimated this\u201d, Winkel says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He lists floods from Germany and Austria, Spain, Dubai, Brazil and Canada. \u201cWe need to think about whether we are pricing this appropriately,\u201d Winkel says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe need to get away from the point of saying \u2018we just do this\u2019, that it&#8217;s run of the mill losses, and eventually you get killed by it, and we don&#8217;t know how to deal with it going forward. We need to address it, and we need to have a proper product and a proper price for it, so that correction will need to take place,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Casualty business is \u201ca volatile area, a heated debate\u201d, Winkel notes. While the issue is really with US loss trends, he is keen to point out the many other parts to the international casualty market, different lines and territories \u2013 all of which have more or less different dynamics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For the US business that has got the industry chattering, it will take some time in this long-tail market to establish whether pricing increases are keeping pace with emerging loss trends. For his part, Liberty Mutual Re is \u201cpretty conservative\u201d about getting too embroiled, whether in the debate or the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cNo one has the right answer to it. You can be very conservative or not so conservative, but you need to have a prudent approach, because that line of business will only go one way,\u201d Winkel adds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dieter Winkel can boast a 40-year career in the reinsurance business and now leads a global reinsurer with around $3bn in gross written premium and approximately 250 employees. President of Liberty Mutual Re Dieter Winkel was the latest guest to feature on Mark Geoghegan\u2019s Voice of Insurance podcast. Happening late in the year, the conversation [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6801,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,26],"tags":[39,14],"line-of-business":[24,28,20,32],"class_list":["post-9286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","category-latest-insights","tag-reinsurance","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-cyber","line-of-business-general-liability","line-of-business-property","line-of-business-trade-credit"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9286","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=9286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9286"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=9286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}