European casualty business is not exposed to the challenges of the US market, with its social-inflation pressures, Aon co-CEO of reinsurance solutions EMEA Tomas Novotny reiterated during a video interview with Insurance Insider at this year’s Baden-Baden conference.
In the Continental market, long-tail reinsurance players are fewer in number, especially in motor classes, and cedants are typically a bit more selective towards reinsurers, he said.
“Less competition is resulting in relatively favourable pricing for reinsurers – so I would expect and we already see some new entrants in this class from the reinsurers,” he said.
European property cat rates stabilised and, in some cases, decreased this year following significant corrections in 2023.
With reinsurers looking to maximise the benefit from hard market pricing, resulting in some over-subscriptions, Novotny said he would “naturally expect the same dynamics going into 2025”.
"Consequently I would expect some rate decreases.”
Even for loss-impacted regions, the broker suggested that the fact events represented a high return period type loss meant that there was no need for structural changes to reinsurance deals.
This comes as 2024 disaster losses, despite being quite elevated, have often remained with primary cedants. Novotny estimated activity to date had translated into a cat loss ratio of not more than 50% for reinsurers.
Cedants are looking for a more equitable split of exposure and premium in 2025, the Aon executive forecast.
"The European cedants will want ... the reinsurance partners to honour the partnership rules,” he said.
Reinsurers needed to help solve the volatility challenges faced by cedants or their relevance would slowly disappear, he added.