Swiss Re’s head of P&C facultative EMEA see growth coming ‘from everywhere’

Laure Forgeron, head P&C facultative EMEA for Swiss Re, sees growth for her area of the business “coming from everywhere”.

The primary market is hardening, not homogeneously across the region, but in pockets, and it is broadening, she said.

“It’s now reaching western Europe. It started in the UK, Germany and Benelux, and now we can see at January 1 it is spreading to Western European countries, and even the Nordics.

“You have almost structural growth based on market hardening. For us at Swiss Re, we are trying to be fairly strategic about it in terms of the type of business we want to write forward.

“We want to grow this kind of portfolio for facultative purchases, so strategic fac for the client,” she said.

Forgeron explained that her business area plans to grow new types of exposure such as cyber, financial lines and special risks. She also wants to grow into countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

“There are so many growth opportunities that the main challenge is to make sure we seize all those opportunities while maintaining a high level of productivity and resources where they are,” she said.

Swiss Re wants to take on as many good opportunities as are available but Forgeron added that it wants to be able to achieve the productivity level to be able to write all those deals. “This means we want to do more portfolio type of cover, more efficient underwriting or automated underwriting,” she said.

To achieve this, Forgeron will draw on a platform that Swiss Re first developed over 10 years ago, called SwiftRe. This is a platform the reinsurer offers clients to enable them to buy Swiss Re fac capacity.

The second piece of the puzzle focuses on taking a whole portfolio underwriting view rather than a single risk view.

“We try to take more decisions based on what we believe the quality of the portfolio is and where we want to diversify.

“Here we can collect the data and visualise the portfolio live, and arrange the data to select the portfolios that we want to grow and move away from single risk underwriting decisions,” she concluded.