Ebb and flow
There is a temptation in re/insurance to talk about markets broadly. Property is softening. Casualty is holding. Aviation needs rate. Alternative capital is expanding. Each shorthand is useful, but Scott Egan, CEO of SiriusPoint, is wary of allowing broad labels to obscure what is actually happening underneath them.
Casualty is perhaps the most obvious umbrella to question: “There’s no such thing as casualty. It’s made up of lots of different lines,” he told Bermuda:Re+ILS.
That instinct, to resist treating whole classes as a single trade, says something broader about the way Egan wants SiriusPoint to operate. The company is not trying to anchor itself to one view of where the market is heading. It is focused on retaining the ability to change its answer as conditions move. “You have to manage actively and dynamically,” Egan said. That means reducing business in one area while still finding opportunities within it, growing elsewhere without assuming that growth must continue indefinitely, and moving capital when the economics no longer stack up.
“It’s being really selective and knowing when to move,” he added.
Different markets, different answers
Property catastrophe is the clearest example. Rates have softened materially over recent renewals, but Egan does not see that as a reason to make a wholesale call on the class. While a small percentage of their portfolio, SiriusPoint continues to renew relationships where it believes the return remains adequate and walks away where it does not.
Even within a market often described in broad terms, the answer can differ risk by risk.
The same applies elsewhere. SiriusPoint has reduced reinsurance overall, yet Egan continues to see opportunities in areas such as structured property and structured casualty. Casualty pricing, meanwhile, has started to moderate, but not uniformly and not, in his view, to the point where the market can be described simply as inadequate. “I think the rate, and I’m being very general here, but on average, the rates are in line with inflation, slightly above,” he said.
Aviation is different again. “I think aviation is underpriced,” Egan said. “It’s underpriced based on the frequency that we’re seeing.”
The point is not that SiriusPoint has a contrarian view on each class. It is that there is no single market direction to follow. For Egan, that makes adaptability more important than conviction for its own sake.
Creating room to move
That flexibility depends on how the portfolio is constructed. SiriusPoint has spent the past few years deliberately reducing its volatility profile. Egan is careful with the distinction: “If you’re going to have a strategy that says lower – not no volatility, it’s just lower volatility – then we measure it,” he said. “Talk is cheap.”
The purpose is not to strip risk out of the business. It is to create more room to decide where that risk should sit.
Accident and health is one example. The business has grown over the past 12 to 18 months, and Egan sees it as countercyclical to parts of the P&C portfolio. It is also lower volatility. “When one area of business is growing, then in effect that allows us to take more volatility in other areas without changing the volatility profile,” he explained.
What Egan describes is diversification: rather than simply smoothing earnings, different parts of the portfolio can create capacity for SiriusPoint to take risk elsewhere when the opportunity justifies it. That, he said, is where portfolio construction and capital allocation meet.
Growth does not have to come from the same place
The same principle applies to growth.
SiriusPoint has been expanding in insurance while reducing reinsurance exposure where the returns are less compelling. Egan sees that as an advantage because it means the company does not have to defend top-line growth in every part of the business at once.
“We’re not going to write business where we don’t feel like we’re getting adequate return for the risk,” he said. “The great news for us is we’ve got growth opportunities in the insurance space, so we’re able to move our capital around.”
MGA and programme business is an important part of that. Egan believes SiriusPoint has positioned itself strongly with specialist partners, particularly those with deep expertise and meaningful alignment.
“We tend to partner with deep specialists. Customers actually buy from MGAs because of their knowledge and expertise,” Egan said, rebutting wider criticism about MGA behaviour in growth for growth’s sake.
“If we establish a new MGA or programme partnership, growth can come from that partnership rather than just from favourable market conditions,” he said. That creates another route to growth when traditional market conditions are less supportive.
The attraction is not that these businesses are somehow immune to insurance economics, they are not. But they give SiriusPoint more than one place to look.
Flexibility still needs a fixed point
A business that constantly shifts can easily become directionless. Egan’s answer to that is to keep the return objective relatively fixed while allowing the route towards it to change.
SiriusPoint’s aspiration is to deliver a 12-15% return across the cycle. That means the portfolio has to be managed not just for favourable conditions, but through less favourable ones as well.
The objective therefore provides the anchor. What changes is the mix. That is also why Egan keeps returning to the need to move quickly. Over the past few years, SiriusPoint has focused on an operating model intended to support faster underwriting decisions and more efficient movement of capital around the group.
“The ability to be able to move quickly, make quick underwriting decisions, move capital around the group to make sure it’s in the right place to maximise those opportunities has been a deliberate focus,” he said.
In that sense, adaptability is not simply a balance-sheet characteristic. It is an organisational one.
The risk does not change because the capital does
The growth of alternative capital reinforces the need for that clarity. Egan accepts that new capital changes market dynamics. Risk can be parcelled differently, new structures can emerge and additional capacity can put pressure on pricing. But he is sceptical of the idea that the source of capital changes the fundamental economics.
“The risk is the risk is the risk, and ultimately capital is not free. It doesn’t matter if it’s new capital or old capital; they have to make a return,” he said.
That principle is particularly important when the underlying result takes years to reveal itself.
Short-tail risks can demonstrate their economics relatively quickly. Long-tail casualty cannot. The answer is not to make a sweeping call about which capital source or class will win. It is to avoid locking into assumptions that the market may later disprove.
Ebb and flow
Egan is realistic that the next phase of the market will be more difficult to navigate. But SiriusPoint’s ambition is not to guess every turn correctly. It is to have enough balance in the portfolio, enough freedom in the capital base and enough speed in the organisation to respond when the answer changes.
That means accepting that some businesses will grow while others shrink, maintaining relationships in markets where the economics still work and stepping away where they do not, and allowing different parts of the portfolio to play different roles at different points in the cycle.
Egan concluded: “We will maintain our underlying discipline, and we will ebb and flow.”
Read the full Bermuda:Re+ILS Annual 2026 here.
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