Beach & Associates hires Warren Berkstresser to build its US west coast business

Beach & Associates has hired Warren Berkstresser as senior vice president of its US reinsurance division, Beach Re.

He will join at the end of October and will report to Simon Hedley, chief executive of Beach North America.

Berkstresser will focus on developing the US property treaty and specialty programmes business. He will also launch and run Beach’s new office in Seattle and sit on the North America office head’s executive team.

Berkstresser was formerly at Willis Re, which he joined in 2010 before rising to executive vice president of production and broking, specialising in the property catastrophe market. He managed a team responsible for analysis, structuring, marketing and negotiating advanced risk transfer strategies, consisting of traditional reinsurance, capital market solutions, and accretive business partnerships.

He began his reinsurance career in 2005 within Guy Carpenter's Instrat Global Analytics, spending four years helping develop risk transfer solutions, supported by predictive, financial and catastrophe modeling analyses.

Hedley described Berkstresser as the perfect embodiment of the 21st century broker, combining extensive analytical skills with an outstanding insight of the P&C market. “The role of the treaty broker is constantly evolving – brokers need to combine the sales aspect and understanding of their marketplace, with a deep, technical knowledge,” he explained.

Jason Howard, chief executive of Beach Group, said Berkstresser will be vital in Beach’s US expansion plans and working with its parent, Acrisure, to identify mutually beneficial opportunities to build the franchise. “Acrisure has a significant retail property and casualty presence on the North American west coast so we are happy to be complementing this with our reinsurance capabilities,” he added.