Rising Star: Stephen Bath

Stephen Bath, as chief underwriting officer of Euclid Mortgage, leads the firm’s underwriting strategy and portfolio management, with a focus on disciplined risk selection and the creation of sustainable profitability for its carrier partners.

Before joining Euclid Mortgage, Bath spent 12 years at RenaissanceRe, progressing through analytical and underwriting roles across property and credit lines and ultimately serving as head of mortgage within the credit team.

Bath received early support from the Bermuda Foundation for Insurance Studies (BFIS), whose scholarship enabled him to pursue undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia and whose mentorship and guidance helped launch his career in reinsurance.

Bath has remained actively involved with BFIS throughout his career and currently serves on its board, where he chairs the fundraising committee and helps advance the foundation’s mission of developing Bermuda’s next generation of insurance professionals.

Can you start by telling us what inspired your career?

I wouldn’t be where I am today without the incredible support from my parents, exceptional mentors throughout my career, and the financial backing of the Bermuda Foundation for Insurance Studies, which really helped open doors early on.

Today, I’m inspired by all of them, but most of all by my wife, Charlene, and our two boys, who remind me every day why I do what I do.

What elements of your career do you enjoy most and why?

What I enjoy most about my career is the constant opportunity to learn and evolve. The reinsurance industry never stands still. New products, new risks and new perspectives continually challenge us to adapt and think differently. I’ve been fortunate to experience that growth first hand, taking on diverse roles across property and credit lines and learning from some exceptional colleagues and mentors along the way.

The foundational principles I learned early on have proven transferable to every new role and product I’ve worked on. I’ve always enjoyed the process of applying those fundamentals to new and unfamiliar problems.

Can you share an example of a challenge you overcame that significantly shaped your career trajectory?

While not a “challenge” in the traditional sense, the most defining shift in my career came when I decided to leave the relative security of RenaissanceRe to join Euclid Mortgage as chief underwriting officer. It was a major inflexion point, moving from a large, established reinsurance platform to an entrepreneurial venture where we were effectively building from the ground up.

I was inspired by the opportunity to help shape something new alongside an exceptional group of principals in Joe Monaghan, Ken Bjurstrom and Joe Hissong. These were individuals I had long admired for their integrity, technical excellence and central role in creating the current mortgage reinsurance marketplace. The move required a degree of calculated risk, but it also offered the rare chance to apply everything I’d learned in my career to a truly formative stage of a business.

The transition couldn’t have been smoother, and it’s been incredibly gratifying to help build a platform that’s not just succeeding, but thriving.

Joining a team that had already been recognised by The Insurer magazine with the 2025 programme launch of the year award was both inspiring and a clear affirmation of the exceptional talent and vision our CEO Joe Monaghan had brought together.

Much of that success stems from the culture established by the Colis family and the entire Euclid program managers organisation. The leadership of John and Nick Colis has created an environment that balances entrepreneurial independence with unwavering support and shared values. That combination of trust, accountability and long-term thinking has been incredibly powerful for us as we aim to execute on our vision. It’s shaped how we lead, underwrite and think about building sustainable value for our partners.

What are your career ambitions? And how will you work to achieve them?

Joining Euclid Mortgage has been a career-defining opportunity. I’ve been fortunate to work alongside exceptional people, first at RenaissanceRe and now with the team at Euclid. My ambition is to help drive our continued growth and establish Euclid Mortgage as a market-leading source of pricing expertise, capacity and thought leadership within the mortgage re/insurance space.

I’ll work to achieve this by maintaining a disciplined underwriting philosophy, deepening relationships with our partners and fostering a culture of innovation and analytical excellence across our team.

How do you stay motivated and continue to learn in such a dynamic sector?

I think that the entire goal is to continue to grow and learn at every stage of one’s career. The re/insurance industry is such a phenomenal sector in that the moment that you feel like you’re plateauing, you can take a slightly different direction that opens a whole new avenue for growth as a professional. I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent my career at firms where that development is prioritised, and opportunities have presented themselves at the right times.

How do you think younger professionals can influence the future direction of Bermuda’s market?

We’ve developed more technologically in the past 24 months than I have seen in the previous 10 years. The large-scale adoption and growth rate of LLMs and other AI processes will radically shift what’s possible in our industry from a pricing, analytics and research perspective.

Younger professionals will have an advantage of being early career adopters of new technologies and will be able to quickly bring these resources to the table. This will be an advantage. For young entrants to the industry, the opportunity lies in blending new tools while learning from and building upon the existing knowledge of the current marketplace.

These new technologies present information so quickly that one can easily become over-reliant on their output – it’s going to be incredibly important to maintain a critical eye and develop your own perspective when leveraging this output.

How have you contributed to innovation or new ways of working in your organisation?

We talk a lot about big data in the reinsurance industry, particularly in the more homogeneous lines of business. Where I’ve focused on adding value is at the inflexion point where data becomes actionable information, connecting large datasets from multiple sources and turning them into insights that inform decisions.

I’ve always believed that innovation isn’t just about building models or tools, but about creating a thoughtful narrative. My goal has been to make complex data interpretable, helping our partners make better, faster and more consistent decisions. That’s something I’ve prided myself on throughout my career, and it’s an approach I’m looking forward to bringing to my role at Euclid Mortgage as we build out our analytics and underwriting platform.

When thinking about leadership, what attributes do you most admire and hope to hone as your career continues?

One aspect of leadership I really admire is the ability to operate with intention. Having a clear objective and taking a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to problem-solving creates alignment, consistency and purpose. It allows teams to understand not just what we’re trying to achieve, but why, and to evaluate thoughtfully how we’re performing against those goals.

I’ve been fortunate to work with some exceptional managers and mentors throughout my career, and I’ve tried to carry elements of their styles into my own approach, whether that’s being deliberate in decision-making, transparent in communication or empowering others to take ownership. Those are the qualities I continue to focus on developing as my career evolves.

In what ways do you think Bermuda can maintain or strengthen its global relevance in re/insurance?

Bermuda needs to retain its position first as a marketplace with leading capacity and innovation. The ability to walk down the street to source capacity is an essential element of our value proposition. In order to maintain that market, we need to continue to develop the best candidates locally to fill an ever-developing set of job requirements.

Given the size of the domestic market, we will continue to need to import talented individuals across the spectrum of roles, but we will rise or fall as a community through the strengths of our home-grown talent.

Through organisations such as the Bermuda Foundation for Insurance Studies, we have an incredible opportunity to continue to foster this development, and I am proud to be associated with the organisation and our efforts to provide university funding to our most deserving students.

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