The re/insurance market has remained consistent towards Swiss Re’s 2025 financial targets, and the reinsurer expects the market to be constructive going forward, according to Urs Baertschi, P&C Reinsurance Chief Executive Officer, Swiss Re.

Earlier today, the reinsurer revealed its financial targets for 2025, which included a Group net income of more than $4.4 billion, as well as property and casualty (P&C) reinsurance combined ratio of less than 85%.

Speaking today at the firm’s management dialogue with investors and analysts, Baertschi highlighted the current market environment, and gave some context towards what the industry is seeing heading towards the key January 1st renewals.

“Overall the market is what we expected it to be and it’s consistent of course with our targets that we’re putting out here as well,” Baertschi said.

“The market is not homogeneous at all. So I’ll give you a little bit of a flavour for what’s underlying here. Most of the time people talk about what’s happening on rates about really, nat cat and really non-proportional nat cat and this has been a very dynamic past few weeks and months, really.

“You might recall when we had hurricane Helene and Milton there was a bit of a question of how big those events would be and what it would do to rates. Before that, there was a lot of talk about rates going down, pretty significantly and then the hurricanes didn’t turn out to be so big by themselves, but overall, in short, nat cat losses are again over $130 billion and so this new normal around where nat cat really is and that reality setting in is now pretty much clear to everybody out there.”

According to Baertschi, when looking at the high layers of non-proportional nat cat reinsurance, it’s been a good place to be.

“Many of those programs have been loss free and of course supply and demand talks in those circumstances. So rates are coming off a little bit in those high layers, as we expected, and which is consistent with our targets for next year. But they are coming off a little bit.

“The per risk, so the more man-made losses, there’s more attention and more of a focus on that because there’s been some losses in that as well.”

He also stated that within casualty there is a global mix, notably in the United States where there are different views on risk.

“In summary, what I would say and what we have been saying, is that we expected the discipline in the market to be maintained particularly around structures and wordings.

He concludes: “We continue to expect the market to be quite constructive and what is currently playing out is essentially what we expected across the board and that market environment in addition to the prudent is reflective in our targets for next year.”