Smart strategy trumps hard-soft cycle on emerging risks: SiriusPoint
Bermuda’s re/insurance market is entering a phase where underwriting advantage is defined less by hard-soft cycles and more by strategy.
That is according to Anthony Shapella, group chief underwriting officer at SiriusPoint, who was speaking to Bermuda:Re+ILS during the Bermuda Business Development Agency’s Risk Summit, held 9-11 March in Bermuda. He identified specific lines that can offer both stability and strategic advantage.
“Accident and health (A&H) is a big business for us, and one that we want to grow because it's stable and has historically generated profit for the firm,” he said. “It serves as a volatility shock absorber against some of the shorter tail specialty classes.”
Shapella pointed out that its growth ambitions are focused on specialty lines, noting that many programme carriers and MGAs are also growing in these areas via strategic partnerships.
“We're a programme carrier, and we believe strongly that with the right selection criteria and disciplined oversight it's a great place to access a specialty business.” He further commented on MGAs growing prevalence and importance in the excess and surplus (E&S) market.
Data-driven pricing remains central, with Shapella citing meticulous monitoring of tracking rate, risk-adjusted rate changes on renewals, pricing of new business, and looking at how loss cost trends stack up against rate. In practice, this reflects a portfolio-centric analytics framework in which underwriters continuously calibrate exposure relative to evolving claims experience.
Bermuda’s operational architecture is also evolving with AI. “We have a lot of text-based data, and machines are really good at reading text, so we can do comparisons and ingest lots of text data at scale with AI,” he said.
“Historically, it would take a human weeks, months, maybe years, to read the equivalent.” Shapella explained that AI is positioned not as a blunt replacement for human judgment, but as a tool to make efficient assessment of back-to-back consistency between primary and reinsurance contracts, a key lever that directly supports both capital protection and underwriting.
The integration of AI intersects with talent strategy: “Many entry-level tasks will be automated, but many of these are tasks that no one likes to do anyway,” he noted. “It will allow people to focus on higher, value-added tasks. It's incumbent upon senior leaders to manage this change and lean into training at all levels.”
Finally, he discussed emerging risks. Shapella was quick to point at geopolitical tensions, explaining that “it's not just what we're seeing right now in the Middle East, it's how this will look in other regions of the world that have similar geopolitical tension. I expect geopolitics is at the top of many board agendas.”
Another risk Shapella pointed to was AI digitization. He explained how many companies are integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into their workflows. As they do that, it creates risk.
“That being said, it also reduces risk because some human-oriented manual processes carry operational risk,” he noted. “So, in one sense, you're reducing risk, in another, you're increasing risk by using the tools.”
He highlighted the difficulties of underwriting a changing dynamic alongside quickly evolving data centres. “My personal perspective is that the industry has already underwritten this risk when businesses moved to the cloud. That was a huge migration that relied upon Amazon, Microsoft and others, building data centres to support cloud migration. So, we're now seeing that again, but on a much bigger scale,” he said.
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