Jim Williamson, President and CEO of Bermuda-based re/insurer Everest Group, Ltd., said its selective approach to deploying property catastrophe capacity has allowed it to defy the gravity of where the market is heading, with the firm achieving a more favourable risk-adjusted rate decline than the wider market at the mid-year reinsurance renewals.
Speaking during Everest’s Q2 2026 earnings call, Williamson said property catastrophe rates across the market declined by around 15% to 20%, while Everest’s own portfolio was down 10% on a risk-adjusted basis.
He attributed the company’s outperformance to a number of factors, stating, “Non-concurrent terms are a big part of it, and in particular, almost all programmes that we write in Florida are on a non-concurrent basis. And so, the market can be doing one thing, and we may be doing something else, and that puts us at a tremendous advantage in that marketplace.”
Williamson continued, “More broadly, our property teams, and this is true in every geography around the world, are incredibly astute at determining where they want to participate in programmes. We definitely will adjust where in the tower we sit based on the availability of margin and pricing and risk. We saw a fair bit of shifting around of our participations, which is why I indicated in the quarter our average attachment point on a return period basis increased. So, we did not come down in the tower to achieve higher rates, we actually went up a little bit.”
He emphasised that Everest is very careful about what programmes it deploys capacity to, deploying more where it sees attractive rates and terms and conditions, and pulling back in other areas.
“We will then move capacity across clients based on where we see risk-adjusted rates going, and so in the most recent renewals, we deployed more capacity with clients where we saw healthy risk-adjusted economics and moved capacity away from programmes that weren’t as well priced or structured. All of that allows us to sort of defy the gravity of where the market is heading,” said Williamson.
Williamson’s comments of moving capacity away from less attractive areas is reflected through Everest’s Reinsurance Treaty premiums falling by 9.1% in Q2’26.
The gross written premium (GWP) decrease within Reinsurance Treaty was primarily led by a 25% decrease in Casualty XOL, 22.8% in Casualty Pro-Rata, 9.2% in Property Non-Catastrophe XOL, and 6.8% in Property Catastrophe XOL, when adjusting for reinstatement premiums, partially offset by a 3.4% increase Property Pro-Rata.
During the call, Williamson added, “My view of property cat rates at this point is they’re still in such a place that it allows us to get a return, an expected return that’s above our threshold for continuing to write that business, and I think that makes us feel pretty good.”
