Liberty Mutual remains cat shy, won’t grow into hardened market

US-based P&C insurer  Liberty Mutual remains cat shy and remains unlikely to extend its property catastrophe book even through the heights of the hard market, top officials have claimed.

“At this point, we are not ready to increase the overall property exposure we have across the enterprise,” CFO Chris Peirce told his company’s investor day gathering.

“At the group level we've held our property cat tolerance basically flat for the past several years and with exposure growing just through inflation, that means we've reduced policy count” to what Peirce believes is a “smaller but better book of business.”

The group’s outward reinsurance portfolio has been shifted for “both less risk and better risk and better paid risk,” the chief of Liberty Mutual’s Global Risk Solutions (GRS) division Neeti Bhalla Johnson (pictured) claimed.

And the broader GRS division, also including North American commercial, Liberty Specialty Markets, and the Lloyd’s operations are under a new supervisory matrix with “a global property head and a global property board that is really focused on looking at continually increasing our ability to deploy capital more optimally and more dynamically across our portfolio,” she added.

The retail side of the business has a very close eye on concentrations, segment chief Jim MacPhee told conference participants. Hurricane geographies have been down as a share of the whole and Liberty Mutual is “always advancing the science peril by peril” for aggregation management, MacPhee said.

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